This month, I’ve teamed up with Seth Harrison, a Senior Associate at Metropolitan Acoustics, to share a few stories of acoustic assembly mishaps we have both seen time and again during our careers. Although, there are always those that will point fingers, and like most unintended consequences, acoustic assembly mishaps are typically the result of a chain of small, perfectly sensible decisions made by numerous people, extending from the first design concepts, through the actual building construction. In the future, the design and construction of a building will include a digital twin: an immersive computer simulation of the building that looks and sounds exactly like the real-world building. The effect of all those small decisions will be immediately obvious and correctable long before construction. Until then, be on the lookout for these common mishaps.
Designers and builders will often use heavy gauge metal or wood studs with short stud spacing to make single-stud walls as stiff as possible in the belief that walls must be robust to provide good sound isolation, but the exact opposite is true. When walls remain flexible, they are able to absorb more of the incident sound, converting it into heat much like batt insulation does in the stud cavities. Decreasing the stud gauge, increasing the stud spacing, and using resilient products such as resilient channel, stud isolation clips, engineered drywall, or viscoelastic damping compounds, are all meaningful ways to introduce flexibility into the wall assembly.