Acoustical Engineering

16/03/2025

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31/08/2024

Acoustic room treatment is essential for several reasons:

Enhanced Sound Quality: Acoustic treatments help eliminate echoes, reverberation, and unwanted reflections, leading to clearer and more accurate sound. This is crucial for environments like recording studios, home theaters, and conference rooms.

Reduced Noise Disturbance: By using sound-absorbing materials, acoustic treatments can significantly reduce noise levels, creating a more peaceful and focused environment. This is beneficial in places like offices, classrooms, and restaurants.

Optimal Listening Environment: Proper acoustic treatment ensures that sound is evenly distributed and free from distortions, making it easier to hear and understand audio clearly. This is important for musicians, audio engineers, and anyone who needs a precise listening experience.

Improved Communication: In spaces like meeting rooms or lecture halls, good acoustics can make communication more effective by reducing background noise and ensuring that voices are heard clearly.

There are several effective methods and materials for acoustic treatment, each serving different purposes.
Here are some common ones:
Methods:
Absorption: This method uses materials that absorb sound waves, reducing reflections and echoes. It’s commonly used in recording studios and home theaters.

Diffusion: Diffusers scatter sound waves in different directions, preventing echoes and standing waves without deadening the room’s sound.

Bass Trapping: Bass traps are designed to absorb low-frequency sounds, which are often problematic in small rooms.

Isolation: This involves creating barriers to prevent sound from entering or leaving a room, often used in soundproofing.

Materials:

Acoustic Panels: Made from foam or fabric-wrapped fiberglass, these panels absorb mid to high-frequency sounds.

Bass Traps: Typically placed in corners, these are made from dense materials like fiberglass or foam to absorb low frequencies.

Diffusers: Often made from wood or plastic, these scatter sound waves to reduce echoes.

Acoustic Foam: Lightweight and easy to install, foam panels are effective for absorbing high-frequency sounds.

Carpets and Curtains: While not as effective as specialized materials, thick carpets and heavy curtains can help reduce sound reflections.

Acoustic Room Treatment

Selby Acoustics

23/03/2023

Acoustic Blinds and Curtains

Are available in a range of fabrics, finishes and colours such as velvet, wool and sheer.
Also effective for private and residential studio and production spaces.
https://www.acousticblindsandcurtains.com.au/gallery/

Why choose acoustic blinds and curtains?

Acoustic blinds and curtains have emerged as a solution that can add to a room’s visual appeal while also addressing that most common of acoustical problems – a high reverberation time.
When the features of a room cause sound waves to reflect off surfaces such as walls, ceilings, floors and furniture, sound can continue to echo in a way that affects speech clarity and intelligibility. Reverberation time refers to how long it takes for a sound to cease after the source has stopped emitting the sound.

Window furnishings such as blinds and curtains are a natural fit with most interior spaces. But unlike traditional window furnishings, acoustic blinds and curtains combine natural materials with unique fabric construction to maximise sound absorption.

Scientifically tested to global standards, fabrics used by Acoustic Blinds and Curtains have sound absorption ratings up to a Noise Reduction Coefficient (NRC) of 0.75. When installed as a finished curtain, this makes them comparable with the NRC offered by leading acoustic panels. However, the effect of installing an acoustic curtain or blind can be greater than indicated by a single number. The ‘wave-fold’ heading of an acoustic curtain can further enhance the effective absorption of sound, for example, and they can be readily adjusted by acoustic consultants to achieve optimal reverberation time reductions as needed.

The smart choice
Whether designing a high-intelligibility environment or a liveable room space, good acoustical design is critical. Just as important is that any acoustic treatment used complements and enhances the space in which it is used. Available in a range of premium colours, styles and fabrics, acoustic blinds and curtains are the right choice when aesthetics matter.
For a simple, cost-effective alternative to acoustic panels, acoustic blinds and curtains offer the best of both worlds – an effective sound-absorption solution and exceptional visual appeal.

Fill in our contact form and one of our team members will call you and organise to come and measure your blinds or curtains. After we receive the measurements we can send you a quote.

02/08/2022

Why too much noise is bad news for coral reefs

The Great Barrier Reef has often been in the news when it comes to the problem of coral bleaching but now researchers say it's facing another problem - too much noise!

A new study found that more fish hatchlings survived the breeding season in quieter areas than noisier ones.
Hatchlings in the quiet areas were also bigger, which could help give them a better chance of survival as they grow older.
Researchers say that protecting reefs from excess noise could help support these ecosystems in the face of the many threats they face.
ophie Nedelec, a marine ecologist at the University of Exeter was one of those involved in the study.
She said ability to hear may help fish do everything from defending their territory to finding a good place to live.
One of the most commonly heard noises came from motorboats.
Although there are many sounds in the water, boats are still much louder and because sound travels better underwater than in the air, even faraway boats can seem very loud.

What did the scientists discover?

The team set up six zones around a field station in the reef - three where boats around the station could move freely and three where boats were banned.
They studied the nests of a fish called the spiny chromis, checking on hatchlings and measuring them over the course of the breeding season to see how many survived and how they were growing.
The results were published on Friday in Nature Communications.
In quiet zones, 65 percent of the nests still had baby fish by the end of the season, but in the noisy zones it was only 40 percent.
Hatchlings in the quieter areas were also larger than those in the noisy zones, which makes them less likely to get eaten by predators.
The team also found that the noise can also affect indirectly affect the levels of oxygen the fish are able to receive.
This is because when nests are in hidden spots like reefs, they typically don't get a lot of water moving in and out, which can reduce oxygen levels.
Adult fish will often wave their fins to keep the water flowing and the oxygen coming in, but this is disrupted by boat noises.
Sophie Nedelec said that the levels of oxygen available can also have an impact on growth rates between the hatchlings in noisy and quiet zones, while noise can also cause more stress to fish affecting their long-term health.

What can be done to help improve the situation?

Dr Nedelec said that she was pleased to find out that "reducing the motorboat noise was improving the survival" for the fish.
She is now hoping to find out if the quiet zones put in place when the research was being carried out could become a more permanent fixture and on a wider scale in order to support reef fish.
She acknowledge that while we should be doing "absolutely everything that we can" to address the climate crisis, that's "not always easy".
But said something like reducing noise could help reefs in the meantime, and that all that was needed to was to "drive further away from reefs, and if we do go near reefs, then just to go a bit slower".

Researchers say that protecting reefs from excess noise could help support these ecosystems in the face of the many threats they face.

03/07/2022

Is it ever a sign of danger?

06/06/2022

Simplifying acoustics
Acoustics can be confusing, here’s how to simplify it

For someone that is new to the world of acoustics, going to a conference like Internoise can be an eye-opener in terms of the width of disciplines that’s included under the umbrella of acoustics. Acoustic Bulletin focuses to a large degree on room acoustics, and we often find that people think of acoustics only in terms of one field like audio, but there is so much more involved.

IOA defines ‘acoustics’ as the science that deals with “the generation, transmission and reception of energy in the form of vibrational waves in matter”. But as they rightly mention, this definition fails to communicate the human side of acoustics, the fact that acoustics is all around us. Even before we are born, we are able to hear, and sound has an influence, both physiological and psychological, throughout our lives.

To help us get a better overview, Lindsay’s Acoustic Wheel was developed in the 60s by Bruce Lindsay.

Lindsay’s Acoustic Wheel describes acoustics as the science which deals with production, control, transmission, receptions and effects of sound. The wheel consists of four sections; Arts, Earth Sciences, Engineering and Life Sciences. The outer circle is described as the disciplines which one may choose to study for a career within acoustics, whereas the inner circle relates to the topics which the various disciplines naturally lead to.
Applying Lindsay’s Acoustic Wheel to healthcare design

In a recent podcast, we learnt how Sustainable Acoustics apply the wheel to architectural acoustics; assisting them to create building designs which help their users. The wheel also highlights how diverse the applications of acoustics are.

One section within Lindsay’s Acoustics Wheel is Medicine. This naturally links to healthcare and shows how we can use sound as a medicine. Our skin and bones both allow sound to infiltrate them, meaning sound can create a therapeutic effect on the body. As Peter Roberts discussed in our latest podcast this allows the patient to feel relaxed which is great because we have clearer thinking, better sleep and a better imagination when we are in a relaxed environment. When noise is reduced and sound used in a positive way, the sounds themselves can be considered nutrition for patients.

Another section of the wheel which reflects further into medical acoustics is bioacoustics. Bioacoustics can be described as the branch of acoustics concerned with sounds produced by or affecting living organisms, especially in relation to communication. Bioacoustics includes animal communication and associated behaviour, sound production anatomy and neurophysiology and the effects of human-made noise on animals. Although bioacoustics do not describe the way which you should create a ‘soundscape’ environment, an understanding of the effects of sound on living organisms such as ourselves can supplement building physics when developing healing environments.

The wheel has 11 main sections and 10 subsections within the circle relating to acoustics, and where acoustics should be considered. Discover the other sections within the wheel on Brigham Young University’s site.

Or listen to our new podcast, Health, wellbeing and the future of acoustic design to discover a deeper understanding of acoustics and how Lindsey’s acoustic wheel can be applied in healthcare.
Acoustics miscellaneous 232

https://www.acousticbulletin.com/simplifying-acoustics

01/04/2022

Sound of the City: Creating a Balanced Sound Composition in Urban Green Spaces

Sound in the landscape is an important and often-ignored aspect of the human experience. In different landscapes seemingly cacophonous sounds can create a symphony, combining the beloved sounds of nature and humans with the often less desirable, but no less important, sounds of traffic and sirens. This symphony of sounds forms a soundscape, a “sonic environment” (Schafer, 1977) that humans experience. Much like landscapes, soundscapes can vary greatly depending on the sound sources adding their voices. This thesis puts the urban soundscape, and its relationship to the landscape and design, under a microscope.

The work of this thesis began with an investigation into the theories of composers John Cage and R. Murray Schafer, along with key research of outdoor soundscape design and application. By establishing ways in which sound had previously been explored from a musical perspective and practical application, the creation of a new design theory and methodology for surveying sound was formed. The design theory demands that the existing soundscape of a landscape be documented and analyzed to ensure that it best suits the wants and needs of its users. Once the soundscape has been documented and the needs established, any necessary changes can be made by altering the landscape. The method of sound documentation was formed in using both auditory and visual components. The auditory portion for this sound documentation methodology has the surveyor take auditory recordings using a portable recording device. The visual portion was created in this thesis and inspired by styles of notation in Western Classical Music, John Cage, R. Murray Schafer, and Landscape Architect, Lawrence Halprin. This combined method allows for sounds in the landscape to be recorded for both the eyes and ears, showing the many attributes of a soundscape over the course of 10-minute intervals.

To test the theory and method, they were then applied to the re-making of an urban soundscape and landscape. Located in Washington D.C., the site was chosen based on a variety of factors including but not limited to, sound sources, size of space, and geographic location. To begin the design process, the site was then analyzed both sonically and visually. The resulting soundscape and landscape design created a more varied and engaging sonic experience, further exploring the impacts of sound on the perception of place and a close examination of the conscious, subconscious, beautiful, and necessary in the design of landscape.

https://drum.lib.umd.edu/handle/1903/27512

18/02/2022

Physicists Discover a Remarkable New Type of Sound Wave

Can you imagine sound travels in the same way as light does? A research team at City University of Hong Kong (CityU) discovered a new type of sound wave: the airborne sound wave vibrates transversely and carries both spin and orbital angular momentum like light does. The findings shattered scientist

08/02/2022

Urban sound designer Dr Jordan Lacey wants to work with city sounds to enhance our urban life. But how do you creatively reshape noise to build social connections and spark imaginations?...

Sonic Rupture: A Practice-led Approach to Urban Soundscape Design (Bloomsbury 2016) by Jordan Lacey offers a practice-led alternative approach to urban soundscape design.

Rather than understanding the functional noises of the city as solely problematic or unaesthetic annoyances to be eliminated, Lacey instead suggests ways in which they can be creatively harnessed to give new expression to urban life.

Featuring expansive theoretical discussions and detailed analysis of Lacey's own work as a sound artist, the book proposes the 5 element sonic rupture model as a way to diversify our experiences of city life.

New Books in Sound Studies is a collaboration between the Centre for Media Data and Society at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary and the New Books Network.

https://newbooksnetwork.com/jordan-lacey-sonic-rupture-a-practice-led-approach-to-urban-soundscape-design-bloomsbury-2016/

Urban sound designer Dr Jordan Lacey wants to work with city sounds to enhance our urban life. But how do you creatively reshape noise to build social connections and spark imaginations?

26/01/2022

Relaxing music can help enhance enjoyment while dining, a new study reports. However, normal background noise in restaurants can have a negative impact on the dining experience...

Noise can make or break a dining experience, according to a laboratory study replicating common noise levels in restaurants.

The acoustic experts say the study proves that high noise levels can play a major part in a dining experience – along with the quality of the food and restaurant service.

“Our study not only shows that relaxing music at low noise levels increases food enjoyment but indicates that even ‘normal’ background noise levels in restaurants can be unpleasant to diners,” says lead author, Flinders University PhD candidate Mahmoud Alamir...

A study reveals how much you enjoy your food depends on the noise in the background. Experts found relaxing music at 30 decibels increased the liking of food by 60 percent.

11/01/2022

Super-slender buildings can make scary noises as they sway, but acoustical consultants say they have solutions.
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(Inside Science) -- In recent years, major cities like New York have sprouted a new breed of skyscraper so tall and thin they look like they should topple in a breeze. Apparently, many of them sound like it, too. "On a windy day, there were literally these sounds almost like guns going off. It was l...

15/12/2021

Acoustic Ring: Well Engineered Performance at Every Scale ( Video 2:50 min.)

Acoustic specialist Zackery Belanger tests LightArts 12ft Acoustic Ring at Riverbank Acoustical Laboratories in Geneva IL. We then shipped our ring back to S...