When Microsoft employees aren’t working on the VALL-E speech synthesis AI, you could find them in Building 87, which contains the world’s quietest room. This anechoic chamber was constructed back in 2015, and to date, no human has been able to stand in the room for more than 1-hour, with the current record being 55-minutes.
Stay for more than a few minutes, and you’ll start hearing your stomach rumbling, beating heart, the air coming from your breathing lungs, and a low-pitched hum from both ears. This happens because the isolated chamber is enveloped by six layers of concrete and steel, which not only blocks out sound from the outside world, but absorbs them as well via fiberglass wedges before they have a chance to reverberate.
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Some of the world’s most extraordinary hardware labs are hidden behind the nondescript exterior of Microsoft’s Building 87 in Redmond, Wash. Inside the labs, small teams of experts work to turn their vision of tomorrow into tangible technology, making essential contributions to products including Surface, HoloLens and Cortana,” said Microsoft.
