Room and Building Acoustics
Room Acoustics
Room acoustics explains room sound fields and their properties, their measuring, calculating, planning and optimization. The phenomena of room acoustics to be considered and the aims of planning room acoustics depend on the intended use of the room. Accordingly, planning concepts using examples of concert halls, opera theaters, lecture halls, classrooms and meeting rooms, offices, workrooms and factory halls are covered separately. There is no generally applicable approach for all these types of rooms and no easy solution for a multi-purpose hall. In that respect multi-purpose halls are always subjected to compromise. If there is a good room acoustics basis provided, an electro acoustics public address system can provide a special support for communication and music renditions. Within their limits electro acoustic systems are capable of balancing out room acoustic deficits.
Building Acoustics
In building acoustics the sound propagation between the rooms in one building is investigated, or between the outside and the inside of the building respectively. The transmission of sound is effected by the resonance of airborne sound from vibrations generated by the building structure. With regard to the stimuli there is a difference between air-borne sound stimulation where air-borne sound will cause the vibrations of the areas confining the room, and impact sound stimulation, where structure-borne sound is immediately entered into the building structure (walking, hammering etc.).
Research at the IHTA is mainly concerned with modeling and auralizing these stimuli and their form of propagation. A major advantage of auralization is that subjective assessments of test persons regarding certain sound situations can be recorded directly. The common approach to stating individual specific values for assessing sound mitigation does not consider sufficiently psycho acoustic and psychological influences. Evaluating the subjective judgement of people can possibly provide a more ‘hearing related’ assessment with the aid of individual specific values than presently common.