Noise Reduction Impacts Health and Education

We were asked by a shelter for abused teens to help resolve some of their problems with noisy classrooms and gymnasium. You will be hearing much more about this project soon, but in the meantime have a look at this video featuring acoustic expert, Julian Treasure. Treasure is the author of the book Sound Business and keeps a blog by the same name that ruminates on aural matters (and offers a nice day-by-day writeup of TEDGlobal 2009).

Because of poor acoustics, students in classrooms miss 50 percent of what their teachers say and patients in hospitals have trouble sleeping because they continually feel stressed. Julian Treasure sounds a call to action for designers to pay attention to the “invisible architecture” of sound.

Despite being a thankless job according to acoustics engineer Gerald Stewart a room that is lacking proper acoustic absorption is useless "Acoustics is the invisible life or death of a room. It is the most annoying thing you can't see when it's wrong and the thing people seldom mention when its right."

When the architect does not "do the job", the complexity and costs of the AV equipment rises proportionately. More microphones must be added, which increases the cost of the electronic matrices geometrically. The loudspeakers require a higher directivity index. The labor increases as the integrator struggles for a higher intelligibility index.

Because of tight budgets in schools and hospitals sound treatment seems to be an afterthought by many architects, we are on the forefront of raising awareness of this issue and helping solve these issues around the world with our quality acoustic soundproofing materials and resources .

Do you know of a noisy environment that needs our help? Let us know