Posts Tagged ‘press’

Building Design + Construction Magazine – Enhanced Acoustical Design

Just in case you missed the August issue of Building Design + Construction Magazine, there was a very interesting article on Enhanced Acoustical Design on page 45.  Truth be told we may be a bit biased as we helped with the article – but you can earn AIA/CES credit for reading it too!

Building Design + Construction Enhanced Acoustical Design

 

SubCat Studios in the Syracuse New Times

A bit more news about SubCat Studios….In case you didn’t catch this article in the Syracuse New Times, we thought we would share it.

Cover of Syracuse New Times

From Syracuse New Times

SubCat Music Studios Open House This Weekend!

We are happy to share that SubCat Music Studios in Syracuse NY is having an open house this coming weekend June 11th, from 12pm to 3pm.  We had the pleasure of working on this project with all of the cool cats at SubCat and Fiedler Marciano Architecture. Come check it out!

 

Fractal Pad

This year we had the pleasure of working with Matthew Bremer from Architecture in Formation on Fractal Pad, which recently was honored by Interior Design Magazine’s Best of the Year awards.  Congratulations Matt!

Fractal Pad

Clean, green, noise machines

Those big, graceful wind turbine power plants dotting the countryside may be a great source of clean power, but they can also represent a source of noise and annoyance to their immediate neighbors.  In a quiet rural area, the whoosh-whoosh noise of a large turbine (some exceeding 300 feet from ground to wingtip) can be audible thousands of feet away.  Several recent epidemiological studies have shown that annoyance from wind turbine noise is greater than that from other environmental sources (such as highways) at an equal noise level.  This discrepancy is likely influenced by unrelated factors (e.g. blocked views), but the continuing push for green energy requires an equal effort to research wind turbine noise and its impact on the health of people nearby.

We recently published the results of a detailed wind turbine noise study in the peer-reviewed acoustics journal Acta Acustica, in conjunction with our colleagues at Chalmers University of Technology and the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. We approached the disparity in annoyance by starting at the source: investigating the accuracy of methods for predicting the noise from a wind turbine in the first place.  Such methods are the basis for designing and regulating wind turbine sites, but necessarily simplify complex factors such as wind and temperature influence on sound.

After an extensive campaign of hundreds of field measurements (in the beautiful Skåne countryside) and days of computer simulation, we found that at a relatively short receiver distance, wind and similar factors were not significantly affecting the sound transmission path—the turbines are simply too tall for wind to influence levels nearby on the ground.  Instead, wind and temperature fluctuation influence the amount of noise generated at the turbine itself, and may do so in ways that aren’t always accounted for in current prediction methods.  As always, further research is needed!

Wind turbine

Wind turbine noise measurement in Skåne, southern Sweden

Noise-reducing city canyons

After a nearly two-year editorial process, we are happy to announce that we’ve recently published a technical paper in the peer-reviewed acoustics journal Applied Acoustics.  Performed in cooperation with our acoustic colleagues at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, the research explores what happens to noise as it travels over the city canyons formed by streets and backyards between rows of buildings—such as those common in New York City.

Although the details are rather technical, the bottom line is that these canyons reduce noise—so the more street canyons between you and that noisy highway, and the wider these canyons are, the quieter the noise will become.

This field of acoustics research helps to improve the acoustic models that acousticians and city planners use to predict noise.  Implemented in software, these models can map out how traffic and new development will impact the soundscape of a property, a neighborhood, or even an entire city.