Cry baby… (Image: Rex Features)

Call it the ultimate internet echo chamber. Researchers at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, UK, have hooked up their acoustic reverberation room to the web, allowing anyone to upload a sound and have it bounce around for up to 30 seconds before receiving a recording back.

New Scientist uploaded a recording of a Beluga whale, a crying baby and solo flute piece, to equally strange and fascinating results. (Click the links to hear the sounds).

The room has been specifically designed to stop sound being absorbed for as long as possible and is normally used to calibrate microphones and measure the acoustic properties of materials. “The chamber’s walls, floor and ceiling are thick and heavy, and coated in a very hard plaster, so that almost all of the energy in a sound striking the surface is reflected back into the room,” says NPL’s Christian Baker.


Baker and another former NPL researcher, Ian Butterworth, originally put the room online as part of a 2011 hack day competition, which they have now revived for the Sónar+D festival in Barcelona, Spain, last week. Users can visit the website, called CloudChamber and upload tracks via the audio service SoundCloud. They are cued up and played in the reverb room during the evening, when NPL researchers aren’t using it. “The tracks are played over a pair of loudspeakers in the chamber and simultaneously recorded on a pair of microphones,” says Baker. “The recordings are then uploaded to SoundCloud, and the person that submitted each recording is tweeted with a link to our website.”

The reverb effect is most effective on recordings with lots of gaps, says Baker, particularly minimal techno, but other sounds also work. “I’ve been recording people making noises at Sónar+D festival, we’ve had beatboxing, clapping, rapping, singing and jokes so far,” he says.

New Scientist‘s contribution obviously had a real effect. “Not sure if it’s my favourite – but one that has stood out so far is the sound of a baby crying – quite creepy!” says Baker.