rfield Laboratories. It’s a room encased in a foot-thick concrete vault. The room itself sits on I-beams which are on springs to isolate external vibration. The inside of the room is full of wedge-shaped foam blocks which prevent echoes and dampen the sound from outside even further. The Guinness Book of World Records measured the sound level in the Orfield anechoic chamber at -9.4 decibels. That works out to a sound pressure level of 6.8 micropascals. To produce an overpressure that small, you’d only need a layer of water 0.612 nanometers thick. At that point, it’s less a puddle and more a molecular stack. That’s pretty damn quiet.
It’s actually intolerably quiet, apparently. The longest anybody’s ever spent in the chamber is 45 minutes, according to that Daily Mail article I linked above. I’ve heard stories about people who freaked out in the chamber because, all of a sudden, they can hear their heartbeats. And some people have auditory hallucinations when deprived of sound long enough, which probably makes the Orfield chamber even scarier.
So -9.4 dB is quiet enough to make you crazy. 0 dB is the threshold of hearing. 10 dB is about the quietest environment you or I will ever experience, and that’s only if we don’t breathe too loud. 25 dB is a very quiet room. According to a funky app I’ve got on my smartphone, the noise level at this desk is 51 dB. The EPA (the US environmental agency) recommends your everyday environment not exceed 70 dB. 85 dB can cause hearing damage over the long-term. 130 dB is painful. 150 dB can rupture your eardrums. This is what I was talking about earlier: logarithmic scales allow you to convert numbers orders of magnitude apart into nice numbers with low digit counts, which makes it easier to compare them side-by-side. When we started out, back at -9.4 decibels, the pressures were so low they were almost impossible to measure. Now, they’re so high they’re doing organ damage.
And speaking of organ damage… The strength of a blast wave is measured by its overpressure, just like the strength of a sound wave. In this fascinating and unnerving paper, some doctors report the effects of 62,000-pascal blast waves on rats. They speak of “minimal to mild alveolar hemorrhages,” as though there were such a thing as a mild case of bleeding fucking lungs. The upshot of all this is that, although 150 dB may burst your eardrums, 189.9 decibels (which is the decibel equivalent of 62,000 pascals overpressure) can actually damage your guts.
But if you’re catching a 190-decibel blast, you’ve got more serious things to worry about than bleeding lungs. Yes, really. There are a lot of reports of soldiers who have been hit by blasts from roadside bombs and car bombs and other such nasty things. Some of these soldiers, although they didn’t hit their heads on anything and nothing hit them in the head, developed serious cognitive problems: difficulty concentrating and short-term memory loss, enough to pretty much spoil their day-to-day lives. In another experiment, rats exposed to a blast overpressure of 20 kilopascals (180 decibels) experienced similar symptoms, and when they were dissected, had lots of dying brain cells. Which is all really pretty damn sad.
As it turns out, there’s actually technically a maximum sound pressure, at least if you want an undistorted sound wave. A pure tone has the shape of a sine wave: the pressure rises a certain amount above atmospheric, drops in a graceful sinusoidal curve, falls that same amount below atmospheric pressure, returns to atmospheric pressure, rinse and repeat. The thing about these kinds of sine waves is that, after their maximum overpressure, they have to drop that far below atmospheric pressure. And if the sound pressure of your sine wave happens to be greater than atmospheric pressure, that can’t happen: pressure is a number that doesn’t go any lower than zero, which is a vacuum. So a sine wave with a sound pressure larger than 1013 hectopascals (1 atmosphere) will sound all right when the pressure goes up, but will get cut off (“clipped,” the sound-engineer people