There’s a room in the Microsoft headquarters that is considered the quietest room on earth. The room is constructed out of concrete compartments, and it is so quiet inside — what the scientists who created it call “negative decibels” — that you can hear your heartbeat and the sound of blood moving through your ear tissue.
It’s what’s known as an “anechoic chamber” (which sounds like a made-up word, although whenever I hear a word for the first time, I always assume that someone made it up). The room was designed to be silent enough to measure the tiny sounds generated by certain electronic devices, and it’s said that 20 minutes inside the room is enough to give anyone a panic attack.
I’m not so sure. Personally, I think the idea of a totally silent room sounds like just the thing. And I’m not freaked out by the sounds of my own body. I’m a middle-aged man. I hear those sounds every morning.
Honestly, it’s comforting to know that there’s at least one totally silent place on earth. The world, in general, is just too noisy. And I’m not talking about the noises people usually mention — babies on airplanes, sirens, jackhammers outside the bedroom window, that sort of thing. Those noises strike me as honest noises, things that disrupt the peace organically, as my fellow humans go about their workdays. The Con-Ed guys outside my window are putting in a new gas line on my street. The ambulance drivers need to get the slowpokes out of the way. I have no problem when people with a job to do make a little noise.
The baby on the airplane, obviously, isn’t technically “on the job,” but who among us hasn’t struggled to seat 46E, hungry and tired and feeling bloated, without wanting to burst into angry wails? I have never heard a baby scream without feeling pure sympathy. Me too, kid, me too.
When my mind drifts to the paradise of the Microsoft quiet room, it’s after being assaulted by different kinds of noises. For instance, this morning at my local coffee shop, a man was watching a video on his phone without his earphones. I nearly poured scalding coffee into his expensive-looking attache case. There’s something about being forced to listen to the sounds coming from someone else’s phone that is deeply irritating. In a similar way, I hate it when I can hear the tinny, scratchy sound of music leaking out of someone’s earphones when they’re not pushed deep enough to form an airtight seal. If I wanted to hear Taylor Swift, I’d listen to Taylor Swift. But listening to Taylor Swift from someone else’s ear canal just seems unhygienic. And annoying.
And it’s not just unwanted recorded sounds that need to stop. Guys in fleece vests walking along the street, having loud phone conversations and saying things like, “But what’s the current valuation?” and “We don’t invest in a product, we invest in a team,” make me long for a few hours of negative decibels, hearing only the sound that air makes as it leaves my nostrils.
I have a friend who makes a chuh-chuh-chuh-chuuuuuuh noise whenever he’s mulling something over. It makes me want to set him on fire, though as of this morning, I have restrained myself. I would take a million babies with a million full diapers on a long-haul flight over that.
Of course, none of those sounds are as bad as the guy at the party who suddenly notices the guitar on the wall and says, “Hey, mind if I play?”
We shouldn’t be surprised by all of this noisemaking. For years, the prevailing therapeutic culture has been telling us to get a little louder. “Make your voice heard,” we’ve been told. “Speak truth to power.” “Refuse to stay silent!” If you’re not irritating your fellow citizen with the sounds of your video, the music in your ears, or the business cliches from your one-sided conversation, you’re not living your authentic life.
Microsoft insists that its quiet room is for product testing only, but I’d be willing to bet that people sneak in there all day just for some relief from the clamor of their co-workers. In fact, it would be a very good business to franchise — quiet spaces all over town where a customer can duck in for a few moments of true, scientifically measurable silence. Maybe I should pitch it to an investor I know, though apparently, he doesn’t invest in products, he invests in teams.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
