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  • This is one of the quietest rooms in the world.

  • Known as an an acoustic chamber, it's perfectly designed to remove sound reflections and echo, and I'm about to go spend hours inside it alone in pure darkness to see what happens to my body and rain.

  • I was invited by three a.m. to come visit their innovation center, as well as their an acoustic chamber, as well as one of the loudest rooms in the world, the reverberation chamber that shook my whole body.

  • Of course, I jumped at the opportunity to potentially put myself through a tortuous experience.

  • For the sake of science.

  • It's feeling like I'm suffocating a little bit.

  • After all, there's been rumors floating around that if you go in an echo chamber for long enough, you go crazy and lose your mind.

  • We're gonna see if I lose my mind If I haven't already.

  • When we got to the 3M testing center, we were met by Brian, who works in the lab.

  • He first brought us into the reverberant chamber, which is basically the opposite of the an echo chamber.

  • Whoa, that actually, like, shook my here.

  • The room is designed to perfectly reflect the sound, making it pretty intense and very loud when the sound leaves the source instead of being absorbed by the walls or other objects, virtually all of the acoustic energy that hits the wall is reflected back into the room.

  • A few extra reflectors are added into the room to keep distribution of sound, even for the purposes of testing, you can put anything you want in there.

  • Midget sound here, microphones over there and you find out how well is this panel blocking this out?

  • Time to pop the balloon to give you a sense of how muddled and reflected the sound can get.

  • Here's what happens as I walk away from the camera.

  • Alright, I'm just going to talk and slowly walk away.

  • Finally, the moment had come.

  • It was time to enter the an echo chamber.

  • There we go.

  • Okay, Whoa, Wow.

  • It feels so weird.

  • And it's way bigger than I thought it was going to be.

  • For some reason, what makes this room unique is it's a full and a Coke so you can see no floor.

  • It's not fun because you look, you should feel like you're coming over.

  • I'm so scared.

  • Oh, okay.

  • No problem.

  • Right?

  • So as you can see from the room, we have these fiberglass wedges placed strategically like this to absorb the sound as it comes in.

  • And as that kinetic energy and the sound waves hit those wedges, those sound waves are transferred into heat.

  • It's so weird.

  • It's so weird.

  • It's almost like uncomfortable before locking myself in the room alone for hours.

  • I wanted to do a couple tests to compare this room to the reverberation room for fun.

  • Here's the direct comparison.

  • Just like a little clap.

  • I'm gonna do a quick little test and walk backwards as I talk to see how the volume changes in my voice because the amount of eco reaching the camera and the amount of audio and sound waves reaching it will change as I get further back, especially the fact that there is literally nothing to reverberate it and concentrate it to you.

  • So the level of audio, even though I've stayed the same, will probably feel quite different.

  • So no echo Brian then locked me in the room alone to see how long I could survive.

  • Yeah, I honestly find it really peaceful when I first came in here, I felt really disoriented.

  • I'm also an anxious person.

  • So it was just like going from a state of being that you're used to into a state that your brain isn't used to processing, like immediately let off my fight or flight.

  • But now, when I sit in silence, It feels really calming.

  • I was told to keep my phone on me because if I needed something, they most definitely wouldn't be able to hear me.

  • After all, the chamber is actually a room within a room, a cement cube within the building, on top of the fiberglass paneling to keep as much sound from both entering or exiting the room.

  • I wasn't going to hear anybody and they weren't going to hear me.

  • After about 30 minutes of silence, I became extremely aware of my body.

  • I can hear a lot of ringing in my, which kind of freaks me out.

  • I just hear, like mhm, mhm, literally.

  • I can hear noises inside my head that I was like while it felt like the pressure had increased in my ear, it was actually the opposite effect.

  • In the real world, our ears are constantly hearing some sound with pressure in the antique oak room.

  • The pressure is gone, so my ears were actually experiencing less pressure.

  • It's definitely a different state of being to remove the sound, but you start to sort of acclimatized to it.

  • I feel more physically in tune with what's happening to me.

  • Other parts of my body.

  • My attention on those parts is heightened, so weird.

  • It's so crazy.

  • I don't want to overdramatize it because I want to be giving you a real experience.

  • It's pretty subtle, but it's something that I haven't experienced before by the hour mark.

  • I was really in my head, but still saying though I was dreading the lights about to go off, they're about to turn off the lights, and I'm actually afraid of the dark.

  • As an adult, I'm not ashamed to admit that, actually, I am ashamed to admit that, but it's gonna be like, Are there monsters?

  • Oh, my God.

  • Oh, my God.

  • I'm actually Oh, my God, This is so scary.

  • Standing was a mistake because I literally I feel like I'm going to fall over.

  • I immediately had to sit down in order to avoid losing my balance completely when people come.

  • I've seen videos of people kind of like overly freaking out.

  • I think it's just really peaceful.

  • We use it a lot for as a development tool, so as we're developing new products or trying to enhance new products, making them even better, the way to get pure information to make sure that we're not getting any distractions from any other sources that may be happening is you come in here and you can really focus not only your products, your attention and your equipment on what the actual problems are.

  • Knowing your data is going to be very, very good, very solid and nothing interfering outside to affect those results.

  • I actually feel like I can hear things more in my head now that the lights are gone because it's all I can focus on.

  • I don't even have a visual input.

  • Now I'm an adult who's actually afraid of the dark.

  • Midway through sitting in utter darkness, I realized this whole part of the video is going to have literally no footage, so I turned my cell phone light on to get a Blair Witch style shop real cool.

  • Mitch.

  • It's feeling like I'm suffocating a little bit.

  • Turn this off now.

  • One hour and 44 minutes in and I started to panic a little.

  • I was no longer looking at the time so I could see what that felt like and later realized I was way off.

  • But I am like, what if everyone just went home?

  • I think they forgot me in here.

  • I swear it's been longer than that we agreed upon, but maybe my perception of time has changed.

  • But it must have been, Oh my God, that was crazy.

  • Made it.

  • That was really cool.

  • It's pretty rare to just look and have your eyes wide open and see nothing and hear nothing.

  • So there you have it.

  • I did, in fact, survive the world's quietest room did not go crazy, though that diagnosis is still up for debate.

  • Brian also let me go under the chamber, which apparently only a handful of people on Earth have ever done so.

  • That felt pretty cool.

  • Balloon acquired.

  • Ultimately, it was a really fascinating experience, something that I have never felt before, and I want to thank three AM for bringing me out to their facilities.

  • Three m is really a company that focuses on science and innovation, and their products are likely scattered through your home or hiding in plain sight around you on a daily basis.

  • So it's been fun to explore the science behind some of that, and I actually created a series on Tiktok and Instagram covering more awesome science behind their innovations that you can go check out on those platforms.

  • All of it is actually blown my mind, and I hope you find it as fascinating as I do otherwise.

  • Thank you so much for watching this video.

  • Make sure you like it and subscribe, and we'll see you next time for some more science piece.

This is one of the quietest rooms in the world.

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