Building Acoustics

About Building Acoustics

The field of building acoustics consists of two part s: Room Acoustics, which deals with sound propa gation in a room and Building Acoustics, which deals with sound propagation between rooms. Typically, room acoustics is related to the quality of sound, e.g. concert hall acoustics, while buildin g acoustics is more related to unwanted sound. When you want to hear as little as possible of what is going on in adjacent rooms.

Sound in a Room

Assume that we put our sound level meter in a fixed position in a room and that we start a sound source. The sound source could be a machine or a combination of a noise generator, a power amplifier and a loudspeaker or anything else making enough noise to make useful measurements. What we will observe now is that the sound pressure level in the room will not rise indefinitely as the sound source continues to "pour" noise energy into the room. Instead, the sound level stabilizes.

The Nature of Absorption

For practical rooms the absorption materials are parts of the decoration: furniture, carpets and curtains. These are all simple porous absorbers. By restricting air particle movements, the sound energy is converted into heat through the frictional forces.

Note that contrary to popular belief absorbers put directly on the wall are not as effective as those placed a bit apart from the wall.

 A carpet lying on the floor will absorb better at high frequencies than at low frequencies. This follows from the fact that as the frequency is increased the wavelength becomes smaller. The quarter wavelength at high frequencies become comparable with the thick ness of the carpet and the absorption increases.

Reverberation
The most widespread way of expressing the amount of absorption present in a room is by means of the room's reverberation time. If we bring in a sound source and our sound level meter and switch on the source while measuring the sound level in the room, we may be able to observe that the sound level will spend a little time increasing until it reaches a stable level.

 If you now suddenly switch off the sound source, the sound level will decay. How fast will depend on the size (volume) of the room and the amount of absorbing materials, but it will not depend on the sound pressure level. Hence it is a room-dependent parameter!

Sound Insulation

In building acoustics where we concentrate on the noise level due to what goes on in adjacent rooms an important parameter is the sound insulation. Values in building acoustics should be normalized and objective, independent of the current conditions of the room. Primarily we want to characterize a wall's ability to insulate rather than the current sound level in the receiving room. Note that many buildings have homogenous structures of low loss factors, typically solid concrete walls. In such constructions sound energy is transmitted with very little attenuation. This calls for impact sound insulation measu ements in addition to the airborne sound insulation.