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General Acoustics - an Introduction..  Acoustics has been the least understood ingredient of building design since the early Roman and Greek periods. Every person has horror stories about headaches following evening meals in noisy restaurants. Or the impossibility of understanding lectures in school auditoriums. Or the acoustically transparent walls in budget hotels or even in quality apartment blocks. And who has not heard of the impossible acoustics in some hall supposedly designed for music? From the theaters of ancient Greece to those of the twenty-first century, architectural acoustics has been a key consideration in design. Only within the past century, however, have we been able to scientifically understand and predict the behavior of sound both indoors and outdoors.' It is through this understanding that acoustics has evolved from a black art into an established field of engineering. Acoustics is the science of sound. We interpret sound through our sense of hearing. Anything
that is interpreted by the senses is open to subjectivity in terms
of likes and dislikes. This subjective interpretation of sound not
only defines the differences between music and noise, but also dictates
the quality of communication within a space. People often think of
acoustics as a narrow, esoteric field that has little practical application
short of designing concert halls. But the field has many practical
branches, including noise control, psychoacoustics (the psychological
effects of sound on people), physiological acoustics (the physical
effects of sound on people), and architectural acoustics. Architectural
acoustics deals with sound in the built environment. In many ways,
especially with music, this field is controversial because of the wide
variation in personal tastes. In many other ways, however, the field
of architectural acoustics deals with accepted scientific principles. |
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