One of the most important, but most overlooked, aspects of designing a commercial space is improving the way that the space sounds. It’s funny because at the core, we are a technology company, but one of the most effective things we can do to improve sound doesn’t involve wires, microchips or speakers. Well at least not directly. What it does involve is controlling the way that sound behaves in a fixed space with the use of acoustic sound panels.

Causes of Sound Deterioration

Most commercial spaces are made of all hard surfaces. By hard surfaces, we mean things like wood floors, concrete floors, drywall ceiling or walls and cinder blocks to name just a few. Hard surfaces in a way, make the sound level in a room build up by amplifying the level. More specifically the sound comes out of something, hits the wall and is reflected. If that reflection hits another hard surface, it is reflected again. The process continually repeats and then sounds become louder as the sound reflects back and forth and new sounds are added. This process ends when no new sounds are added and the sound has time to “decay” or stop reflecting, which is exactly what acoustic sound panels do.

This happens all of the time in restaurants, bars, and other social environments. Think of a place you like to hang out for food and drinks with friends. There are probably wood or tile floors, typically wall and ceilings made of painted drywall, and there are probably glass windows too. These are all hard surfaces with nothing to absorb the sound. The space may sound fine when it is empty but as the environment fills with more and more people the sound level gets louder and louder. As the space becomes louder, the people start talking louder to overcome the rooms’ noise level and the room becomes louder still.

These types of spaces also make speech less intelligible. So not only is it louder, it reaches the point where you can’t distinguish what is being said because the human ear hears what is said along with the other conversations that are being reflected in the room. Because there is so much information for the ear and brain to process the conversation can be lost to the person trying to listen to you.

The Solution: Acoustic Sound Panels

Office buildings are another common type of building where sound tends to bounce around the room in a distracting way. This is especially important in large conference or boardrooms, where it's imperative that employees can communicate with eachother and clients

We were called out to do a conference room for a client. The room was made of drywall on four walls and the ceiling. The floor was concrete and it was covered with a thin rug. Well this room had so much reflection because of the hard surfaces, and as a result, you could barely understand the other person you were talking to, even with only two people in the room. As soon as you stepped out of the room into the hallway you could hear fine again. The difference was obvious. You just felt better as soon as you stepped out of the room; it was noticeably more “peaceful”. 

The question was how were we going to solve this problem? Leaving the room as it was would definitely cause listener fatigue. We suggested putting our ProSoCoustic acoustic sound panels in strategic places on the walls; however, the client was putting dry erase boards along the entire length of the long walls. In addition, one of the short walls would have a TV and projection screen. This left one option, mount the panels directly to the ceiling. So that’s what we did. We worked with Next Industries and the ProSoCoustic engineers to determine how much product we would need for the size space. We mounted the panels so they would look nice around the other equipment on the ceiling (lights, speakers, sprinklers etc.). 

The solution worked out very well. The room was tamed and you could now carry on a normal conversation without the ear fatigue and listening difficulty.