In the current pace of the world, you hardly get any free time amidst a busy schedule. Everybody seems to be looking for some silent atmosphere just so they could calm their mind down. But have you ever thought of what would happen if the same silence you are looking for turns out to be a deafening one?
An anechoic chamber does that exactly. It is a kind of chamber that is designed to completely absorb reflections of either any mechanical(eg: sound) or electromagnetic waves (Eg: Radiofrequency). In short, it is a room that is free from an echo. Apart from the sound produced inside the room, it is isolated from the external sounds too, such that, it is very much silent inside and the effect of this is that you will be able to hear the sound of your heartbeat, blood pumping through your head and even the creaking of your joints. It is not that these sound our body makes are not present in our everyday lives, but are masked by the background noises. Those background noise levels are immensely reduced in the anechoic chamber.
The structure of the room is in such a way that the walls and ceilings are made of fibers glass wedges hence the sound absorption is of the highest degree. The floor is lined with floor wedges for acoustic absorption. The chamber is constructed such that there are no reverberations. Your spatial awareness is sabotaged by the lack of reverberations. An anechoic chamber ranges from small compartments to over as large as aircraft hangers.
These chambers are used to test the emission of sounds by different electronic products or machinery, radars, antennas, and for psychoacoustic work relating to loudness. According to the size of objects and frequency ranges being tested, the size of these chambers differ.
As you enter an anechoic room, you might expect it to be a world where you can soothe your mind but the effects of deafening silence in the human body can be unsettling for some while some others would find it easy to adjust with this. Silence says a lot more than what you really think.
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