The official quietest place on earth is a chamber on the Microsoft campus

The anechoic chamber on the Microsoft campus in Washington.
(Image credit: YouTube.com/Microsoft)

In order to test equipment and work on voice recognition projects, Microsoft needed to build an incredibly quiet anechoic chamber on its campus in Redmond, Washington. It turned out the room they made was so quiet it shattered a world record.

Guinness has verified that the chamber, which is lined with wedge-shaped sound absorbers, reaches -20.3 decibels, an amazing feat considering the fact that when air molecules bounce off of each other, the noise barely registers -23 decibels. The chamber is in Building 87, but it's far away from the other rooms in order to keep vibrations out. The previous record of -13 decibels was set at Orfield Laboratories in Minneapolis, NBC News reports. Catherine Garcia

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Catherine Garcia, The Week US

Catherine Garcia is night editor for TheWeek.com. Her writing and reporting has appeared in Entertainment Weekly and EW.com, The New York Times, The Book of Jezebel, and other publications. A Southern California native, Catherine is a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.