The Quietest Room on Earth

1. 0:00Eli I’m going to stop talking now. This is the chamber. Nadia’s in here with me. We’re going to sit for a minute.
2. 0:42Nadia That was the longest minute of my life. I could hear my eyelids.
3. 1:36Eli From a former piano workshop in Philadelphia, this is Overtone. I’m Eli Brandt.
4. 1:44Nadia And I’m Nadia Ferreira. Today, the quietest room on Earth, and the man who builds them.
5. 1:58Eli Sven Aaltonen, welcome to the show.
6. 2:04Sven Thank you. It is very loud in here, by the way. I mean that kindly.
7. 5:01Nadia How does somebody end up building silence for a living?
8. 5:09Sven I was a mechanical engineer working on ventilation. Fans, ducts. My whole job was making things quieter. One day someone asked if I could make a room where there was nothing at all, and I said yes before I knew how.
9. 9:00Eli So what is a chamber like that actually for? Nobody builds it just to sit in.
10. 9:08Sven No. It is a measuring instrument. If you want to know exactly what sound a microphone or a hearing aid or a car door makes, you need a room that adds nothing of its own.
11. 19:40Nadia We went in. Describe what we were sitting on, because it moved.
12. 19:48Sven A net of steel cable, stretched over a pit full of wedges. The wedges are below you, above you, on every wall. You are floating in the middle of a very large, very soft hedgehog.
13. 30:20Eli People talk about going a bit mad in there. Is that real?
14. 30:28Sven It is mostly real, but it is not the silence. It is that your brain never stops listening. When the world gives it nothing, it turns to you. After ten minutes you hear your own blood. After twenty, you hear your joints.
15. 35:35Nadia I heard my stomach and decided not to mention it.
16. 41:30Eli Let’s talk about the wedges. Why are they that shape?
17. 41:38Sven A sound wave arriving at a wedge gets trapped between the faces and loses a little energy each time it bounces. The longer the wedge, the lower the frequency it can catch. Ours are one point two metres.
18. 50:10Nadia Lightning round. Favourite sound?
19. 50:14Sven Rain on a tin roof at my summer cottage. It is very loud and I love it.
20. 55:30Eli That’s our show. Thanks to Sven Aaltonen. Overtone is produced by Rosa Lindgren and edited by Kit Harlow. See you in two weeks.

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