ARCHITECTURAL ACOUSTICS
Acoustic comfort is as important to health and happiness as physical comfort and visual esthetics.
Architectural Acoustics
At RhoCubed we have expertise in many different aspects of acoustics including underwater sound propagation, atmospheric sound propagation, and even ultrasonic sound propagation in human tissue. Our primary interest, however, is architectural acoustics, also called room acoustics. As the Phoenix area representative for SoundSense, a full service acoustic consulting and engineering firm, we have access to extensive expertise in architectural acoustics plus the products and services needed to address almost any architectural acoustic problem. The SoundSense website (soundsense.com) provides information about the company and the services that they provide. The remainder of this page offers some thoughts about why the often neglected field of architectural acoustics is so important.
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A designer, architect or home owner would never ignore the visual aesthetics of the living spaces that we occupy. We all recognize the need for a visually pleasing environment. Whether we want our environment to be calming, exciting, simulating or simply to express our personal taste we do it with paint, wall paper, artwork and architecture. These things make us happy, comfortable, relaxed or, in a word, healthier. Yet, when it comes to our acoustic environment we usual just take what we get. If this makes us uncomfortable we try to ignore it and, over time, most people will say they “don’t notice it anymore.” But, our body does notice and your health is affected.
Noise Abatement
Physically, there is no difference between sound and noise. Noise is just the name we give to unwanted sound. Our auditory system doesn’t distinguish between sounds that are desirable and those that are not. Loud is loud and hearing damage can result from any loud sound. The rest of our physiological systems do distinguish between desirable sounds and undesirable noise. Chronic exposure to undesirable sounds, even at relatively low levels, increases stress and thus increasing all the adverse health consequences that come from stress. This includes cardiovascular disease, gastrointestinal problems, sleep disorders, birth defects and psychological problems.
In the United State, the Noise Pollution and Abatement Act of 1972 established mechanisms of setting noise emission standards for all common sources of noise. Unfortunately, the US congress stopped funding the federal noise control program in 1981 leaving noise control regulation to local governments. OSHA regulations provide noise safety limits to protect against hearing damage in the work place but there are no other federal noise regulations.
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In 1999, the World Health Organization (WHO) published Guidelines for Community Noise which were intended to address noise pollution in Europe. These recommendations deal with all types of noise pollution from relatively minor noise annoyance to serious hearing damage. The WHO guidelines recognize that even minor noise annoyance can have serious health consequences over time. The WHO guidelines are summarized below. The full report can be found here and a summary of the report can be found here. From the following table it is clear thatneven relatively low noise levels will have adverse health consequences, particularly if sleep is interrupted or stress levels increase, even if we are not conscious of it or have learned to ignore it.
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“Place is ridiculously noisy. I don’t enjoy that but seems to be a new thing for these restaurants. Think it is for the smartphone crowd that doesn’t actually speak to each other. There is zero noise reduction materials in the place. Wide open to kitchen and bar is in restaurant area. So it is very very noisy.”
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“Cool place but so noisy we couldn’t really talk to each other.”
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“Be warned it is really noisy, so don’t expect to be able to carry on a conversation…”
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“The noise level made it hard to have a business conversation over lunch.”
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This problem is so ubiquitous in the restaurant business that many people assume that it is just the price one must pay to go to a popular restaurant. Unfortunately, it is a price that we pay with our hearing and our health, not to mention the health of the employees that work in these establishments. Although the problem here is excess noise, the noise is not generated externally. The patrons of the restaurant are both the source of noise and the recipient of the noise. This requires a different approach to noise abatement than discussed above but it is no less important to the health and well-being of those exposed to it.
Acoustics Environment
We all recognize the need for acoustic treatments in high-end media rooms, listening rooms, recording studios and theaters where acoustic fidelity is critical. Striving for acoustic perfection is both a science and an art that takes both knowledge and experience. Fortunately, SoundSense, LLC has both and has treated many media rooms and critical listen spaces. The principles that apply to high-end critical listen spaces also apply to other spaces that often require acoustic treatment even more than a media room.
The United States General Services Administration (GSA), in their 2011 document titled "Sound Matters", defines the term Acoustic Comfort in the work place to mean that “the workplace provides appropriate acoustical support for interaction, confidentiality, and concentrative work.” According to the GSA, less than 40% of office workers are satisfied with the background noise level of their work place and only 20% are satisfied with the level of speech privacy. All other aspects of office environmental conditions achieve satisfaction rating of 70% – 80%, except for temperature which achieves a satisfaction rating of only 50%; presumably people just can’t agree on temperature. These statistics suggest that the acoustics of the work environment are almost universally ignored.
The work place is not the only indoor environment that fails to achieve a satisfactory “acoustic comfort” level. Most people would agree that busy restaurants are almost always too noisy making it very difficult to hold a conversation. A quick survey of popular restaurant in the Phoenix area, as characterized by reviews on yelp, turns up statements like this.