Lessening Sound Transfer Between Classrooms

By Author: Kevin Richard
Total Articles: 240
Comment this article

Schools are ambiances where it is important to have proper acoustics and to lessen noise transfer from the adjoining rooms, for efficient learning and teaching.

A noisy music lesson in a single room with inferiorly sound insulated walls could apparently be highly disruptive to a serene maths lesson happening in an adjoining room. There are various ways in which noise transfer can be lessened between school learning areas.

Environment noise

There will always be some amount of background noise in the school, whether from kids taking a plane flying overhead, in a hallway, or heavy traffic on a road outside. This can make it difficult for a teacher to be heard, and can also be distracting for the kids. External noise can be addressed through a careful choice of ventilation and glazing. Rainfall may create tremendous amount of noise, specifically if falling on the metal terraces of gyms and halls. This can be substantially lessened by fitting a wall noise material around 60% below a roof. Moreover, sound ...
... blocking panels can be fitted into upgraded suspended ceilings.

Impact noise, for instance, from feet tramping over hard surfaces like wooden floors, can be lessened by laying floating floors with a noise resilient layer, or by adding an acoustic underlay to prevent harmful noise levels. These may have the benefit of lessening airborne sound, and also lessening impact noise and are beneficial where classrooms are beneath other classrooms.

Acoustic separation

Various school rooms have various noise tolerances, so a relatively noisy ambiance might be more acceptable in a school dinner hall where there is no learning happening, while in a classroom will have a much lesser noise tolerance level than the standard db sound level. It is vital to calculate noise tolerance levels in the room, and also the noise that will be generated within, and also to consider noise generation and noise tolerance levels in an adjoining room. A special table can be utilized to calculate the requirement for acoustic separation between rooms and higher the number, the greater the requirement for soundproofing.

There are different kinds of acoustic boards available which can be utilized to upgrade walls, ceilings and partitions, depending on how loud is 90 decibels of sound which don’t add tremendously to the density of the walls. These are specifically beneficial for soundproofing the music and classrooms.

Echo time

There will be long echo times, or reverberations, in teaching areas that may have lots of hard surfaces, and these can imply that speech is blurred and hard to realize. The teacher might then raise the voice, which can enhance echo and compound the issue. The answer is to add acoustic absorption panels to hard surfaces of ceilings and walls. These are specifically efficient in lessening echo times in gyms and assembly halls, which are generally double height spaces.