FROM THEFIELD
TALES
as told to Eleanor Cummins / illustrations by Natalie Andrewson POPSCI.COM•WINTER^201997
After college, in 1969, I worked
as a salesperson in the office-
furniture industry and sold a
cubicle marketed as having “speech pri-
vacy.” It didn’t work—people could overhear
each other—but nobody knew why the de-
sign failed, or how to fix it. A couple of years
later, in Minneapolis, I founded what’s now
Orfield Laboratories, a multisensory re-
search center, to tackle problems like these.
We can test everything from consumer
response to the sound of a Harley- Davidson
motorcycle to how lights in retirement
homes affect elderly residents’ cognitive
functioning. But the lab is best known for
its anechoic chamber: a room that is
completely void of reverberations. It ab-
sorbs 100 percent of sound waves at
specific frequencies, so you can understand
exactly what noise a product will make, free
from any inter ference. It’s a six-sided box
made of 4- inch- thick insulated steel panels.
Every surface is then covered in fiberglass
wedges that are 3.2 feet deep. The whole
system floats independently on springs.
That structure is then enclosed twice, in-
cluding by a layer of 12-inch-thick concrete.
Most such chambers around today are
about 30 decibels, similar to a quiet bed-
room. Ours averages at about negative 13.That means any sound waves still present
in the space are far below what most
human ears can perceive.
People come from all over to tour our
facility and step into the chamber. It’s sort
of like being an astronaut or a submariner.
With the lights out, you can’t orient yourself
in space because you can’t see or hear.
Folks stand still, and some even fall over.
Within 10 minutes, your ears start buzzing,
and after 30, you can hear your heart beat-
ing and your joints rubbing against each
other. I don’t go in often. I have a mechani-
cal heart valve, and I can’t stand the whirl
of its machine like clicks for too long.NOISE IS CANCELED
welcome to
the quietest
place on earth
STEVE ORFIELD, PRESIDENT
OF ORFIELD LABORATORIES