Imagine the loudest room in the world, what kind of place comes to mind?

For most of us, this is probably the time we’ve stood too close to the speakers during a concertor a plane full of screaming children.

And this place?

It doesn’t seem particularly noisy here, does it? (Orfield Laboratories)

At first glance, this unassuming room may seem like a post-modern art installation and nothing particularly taxing on the ears – but that’s where you’d be wrong. The room is actually a reverberation chamber specially designed so that each surface is able to reflect sound energy, allowing the entire space to remain at the same volume.

This particular room is located at Orfield Laboratories in Minnesota, USAknown for his infamous anechoic chamberaka the “quietest room in the world”. But in this case, instead of driving you crazy with a total absence of sound, the reverberation chamber will send noise back to you until it becomes unbearable for the human ear.

Which is probably even more unpleasant than hanging out in a space known to be so quiet that you can hear the sound of your own organs.

What happens to a person in a reverberation room?

Thanks to weird and wonderful world of the Internet, there is no shortage of people willing to inflict excruciating pain on themselves in exchange for the chance to go viral.

One of these people is YouTuber Ryan Trahan, who volunteered to find out how long he could last in space.

Spoiler alert, it didn’t end very well.

This content creator learned that music is much less pleasant in a reverb chamber (YouTube/@Ryan)

Upon arriving in Minnesota, the content creator spoke with Steve Orfield, owner of Orfield Laboratories and sound expert, to find out how the space works.

“A reverb room is a room that is pretty much 100 percent reflective,” he explained. “So no matter where you are in a reverb room, the sound is neither louder nor quieter… The sound is the same everywhere.

“The louder you speak, the worse it is,” he added.

In order to conduct Trahan’s experiment, Orfield suggested he play classical music through a series of speakers and see how long it took before the reverberating sounds became too uncomfortable to handle.

Not even a minute into the experiment, the content creator seemed visibly uncomfortable. After nearly two minutes in the room, Trahan was forced to cover his ears due to “sensory overload.”

He then attempted to walk around and even dance as a means of distraction, before finally finalizing the experiment after three minutes and 37 seconds.

Reflecting on the uncomfortable experience, Trahan noted that he “physically couldn’t” stay still because of the noise levels.

For more information on Orfield’s work, check out his lab page here.