Enter One of the World’s Quietest Rooms

Science Quickly

Scientific American

Science

4.3 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 3 October 2025

⏱️ 19 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Inside one of the quietest rooms in the world, host Rachel Feltman meets artist-in-residence Seth Cluett at the historic anechoic chamber at Bell Labs to explore the science of silence and sound perception. From popping balloons in total silence to hearing your own nervous system, we dive into psychoacoustics, audio innovation and the emotional impact of sound design. Along the way, we uncover how Bell Labs shaped everything from stereo audio to the voice of HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Science Quickly is a Signal Awards finalist! Support us by casting your vote before October 9 at the following link: https://vote.signalaward.com/PublicVoting?utm_campaign=signal4_finalists_finalistnotification_092325&utm_medium=email&utm_source=cio#/2025/shows/genre/science E-mail us at [email protected] if you have any questions, comments or ideas for stories we should cover! Discover something new every day: subscribe to Scientific American and sign up for Today in Science, our daily newsletter. Science Quickly is produced by Rachel Feltman, Fonda Mwangi and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was edited by Jeffery DelViscio. Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck fact-check the show. The theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	This experiment just pops a balloon.
0:02.0	And normally when a balloon would pop, you'd hear the whole room just kind of expand, right?
0:08.0	Yeah.
0:13.0	Pretty loud.
0:14.0	Yeah, pretty loud.
0:15.0	But in this room, there's none of that.
0:18.0	So you're going to hear it as a very sharp sound that just disappears completely. Cool. Welcome to the Antichord Chamber. Watch your step.
0:32.6	Wow, it is already super quiet in here. And it's going to get even more quiet when we close the door.
0:38.3	Oh my I was that.
1:05.7	It did get a lot more quiet.
1:07.0	Yeah.
1:09.0	Welcome to Science Quickly.
1:10.5	I'm Rachel Feltman and today I'm here with Seth Cluitt at Nokia
1:14.8	Bell Labs. And you may notice if you're listening to this or if you're watching it that there's
1:20.9	some interesting stuff going on with the sound. Seth, would you tell us more about why that is?
1:26.3	Yeah. So we're in the historic anechoic chamber at Bell Labs.
1:30.9	It is a room that absorbs 99.999% of sound wave propagation
1:36.8	and eliminates sound from the outside almost entirely.
1:41.0	It is an echoic, meaning it lacks echo.
1:48.4	So an anechoic chamber is intended to absorb as close to 100% of incidental reflection as you can possibly do. This room, as you kind of look
1:55.6	around, is a 30 by 30 cube with a wire mesh a third up from the floor.
2:01.3	You might ask yourself, like, why is it a third up from the floor, not in the center?
	...

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