Comment by martyvis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by martyvis | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I wonder how many building projects use and engage acoustic engineers (unless sound is specific to the use like for theatres or conference facilities)?

I had the "opportunity" as a patient in a very new hospital wing some 7 years ago for about 13 days. While I had a private room, the door was always open to the walkway, I guess as is normal to allow quick response by medical staff. But at one point I really felt overwhelmed by all the external noise that I could hear from the other rooms in the ward, nurse stations, and so on. I really felt that the hard surfaces and even the angular nature of the floor layout was conspiring against me - almost focussing noise into my room. I imagine given enough data you could show the poorer rest of patients prolonged their recovery period and hence increased bed occupancy and cost to the health system (important in a state run public hospital service that is predominant in Australia).

As such it would be nice to think hospitals, schools, offices would include thorough acoustic assessment to at least allow appropriate mitigation of noise during design (before having invoke more active measures like soft furnishings, etc).

My response is US-centric, but most hospital projects do have an acoustics consultant involved. Improvements have been made, but not nearly enough. Challenges include the need for sound absorption to be porous, but this is at odds with cleanability. Increased focus has been on patient room doors, which are increasingly sliders. They work well when they're closed, but the challenges include getting a good bottom seal when the threshold has to accommodate beds and equipment being rolled in and out. Hospital equipment manufacturers are also improving the sounds of their equipment, away from the cheap piezo beepers.

Schools very often have acoustics reviews, although more often in cities than rural areas. Classrooms in addition to auditoria, gyms and common areas. Standards exist for those too.

Office buildings are hit or miss. The developer may hire us for a base building review. Tenants' architects hire us as they design their workplaces. There's a lot of push and pull to find a balance of the modern open ceiling industrial aesthetic and glass conference rooms with reasonable acoustical goals.

Some, but Not enough

Working in conference rooms, people far too often are concerned about the look ( big windows, natural light, great table ) and less concerned about acoustics than would be reasonable. In my experience, Architects think people just sit around the table, and chat.

I once had a brand new office upfit project with a "flagship room" that was a large flex space, (could be a board meeting, could be a hackathon). There were three sides of glass, a concrete floor and metal ceiling structure. If you clapped in the room, it could be heard for 1.5 seconds as it bounced across all those surfaces before decaying.

My bosses were furious at the microphone quality, the installer was unhelpful and bailed on us. We hired a consultant to perform an evaluation and he told us that the room was awful, with lots of numbers ( figures for acoustic reverberation at different frequencies ) and told us of certain products that could help in those ranges.

It is a lot easier to design rooms with acoustic features than it is to retrofit them in terrible sounding rooms.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com