Walk into a gymnasium and you can hear the echo from your footsteps as the sound ricochets off the hardwood floor, concrete walls and gypsum ceiling. In some gyms, the echo can last as long as 10 seconds! More often than not, these spaces must not only perform as a sports venue, they are often… Read More
Cafeterias are large, cavernous spaces that are usually made from highly reflective cinderblock or gypsum board walls, have easy-to-clean tile or surfaced concrete floors, are surrounded by windows and more often than not, hard board or steel ceilings. In order to maximize their use, they are often considered multi-function rooms that are used for lunch… Read More
Strike up the band and get ready for a headache! Thirty beginner students frantically playing their hearts out for eight hours a day is only one level below torture! To make matters worse, sound reflects off hard surfaces such as tile flooring, concrete block walls and windows creating a cacophony in the true sense of… Read More
Teaching is difficult at the best of times. But nowhere is the acoustic space more important than in a music teaching studio. Teachers spend countless hours inside small cubicles where they are subjected to ‘varying degrees of musical talent’ and somehow, they are expected to provide a ‘smile’ plus a fresh and enthusiastic lesson each… Read More
With the advent of the internet, affordable video broadcast is now a reality that can be enjoyed by participants around the globe. For the educational facility, this opens the door to creating distant learning programs by making the curriculum available to students in far-away places. And although setting up a microphone and video camera is… Read More
Lecture halls and auditoriums tend to be large impersonal rooms with elongated walls that are made from highly reflective surfaces such as cinder block, gypsum board and tile – all of which are perfect incubators for long trailing echoes. The spoken lesson from the professor or sound from the audio visual system bounces off the… Read More
Most classrooms are rectangular boxes that employ solid concrete block wall construction interspersed hard surfaces such as blackboards and windows with a tiled floor. This provides the ideal ‘spawning pond’ for echo and excessive reverberation. As the reflected sound increases inside the room, the lecture being transmitted is lost in the ambient noise. Intelligibility decreases… Read More
