Eerie Echoless Room Torn Down With Lab

The only place at Harvard where you could hear yourself think has been destroyed. The acoustical laboratory and its ancchoic chamber, housed in its own building on Oxford St., were torn down last Thursday and Friday.

An ancchoic chamber is a completely echoless room, acoustically isolated from the outside world. A person inside the room can hear his own heartbeat because there are no distracting outside noises or internal echoes.

The rare properties of the anechoic chamber are achieved with foot-thick concrete walls and special sound-absorbing wedges protruding into the chamber from the ceiling, walls and floor. A metal grate is suspended in the center of the chamber from which measurements and observations can be made.

Harvard's chamber was built by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) in the late 1940's in connection with research by Frederick V. Hunt, then a professor of Physics. The ONR has supported numerous research projects at American universities since World War II. Hunt has now retired from Harvard and no longer needs the anechoic chamber.

Furthermore, Peter S. McKinney, director of the Laboratories of the Division of Engineering and Applied Physics, said that research requiring the chamber has been very limited in the last five years.

According to Harvard's contract with the ONR, Harvard could buy the building for one dollar but would then have to assume the cost of tearing it down. Since the chamber wasnot being used, ONR gave Harvard until July 1971 to decide whether to buy it or let ONR tear it down. After some deliberation, Harvard took the latter choice.

Wallace C. Sabine, former professor of Physics, developed the science of architectural acoustics around the turn of the century. The first official unit of acoustical absorbtion was an old Sanders Theatre seat cushion which Sabine used to study the acoustics of Hunt Hall. Symphony Hall in Boston is one of the results of Sabine's work at Harvard.