Ecophon Acoustic Bulletin

The Acoustics'08 Conference is now finished!

On behalf of all editors of Acoustic Bulletin we would like to thank all readers, the conference organisers, all those we have met at the Ecophon stand and especially those who we have had interviews with. We trust that your inputs will be of great value to many and we look forward to keep in touch. See you, and we hope you all have a great summer !!

Markku, Paulli, Tobias, Katja, Rainer, Jonas, Katrin, Martin, Per, Tina, Pierre, Colin, Anthony, Mikolaj, Guus, Mariëlle, Carsten, Erling and Marc

Posted by Marc Janssen at 2:52 PM | Permalink

This is an interview with PhD Valtteri Hongisto, Senior Research Scientist at the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health and Adjunct Professor at Helsinki University of Technology.
He has performed a lot of acoustic research and has been involved in the creation of standards and guidelines, for example the Acoustic Classification of Spaces in buildings SFS 5907. Also he is one of the writers of the coming Finnish Classification on indoor climate.

Valtteri mentioned that the ISO standard 3382-3 will only deal with open-plan office acoustics and not with open plans in general, like in schools, libraries or hospitals. The focus will be on spacial attenuation and speech intelligibility. By doing that we can judge the performance at any distance from the speaker.

Listen to the interview (3,47 minutes).

By Pauli Pallaskorpi, Concept Developer - Education and Markku Hirvonen, Concept Developer - Healthcare, Ecophon Finland.

Posted by Marc Janssen at 11:43 PM | Permalink

The use of alarms in hospitals was discussed intensively during the two days session "Healthcare Acoustics & Speech Privacy".

A study presented by S. Okcu, College of Architecture, GaTech, states that a patient in an ICU can be surrounded by up to 33 different alarms from medical equipment. Not only are the alarms disturbing to the patients, they also make the task for the staff to detect and analyse them more demanding.

Ilene Bush-Vishniac
"The alarms are of utmost importance, but do we really need all these alarms?" This is a question asked by Dr. Busch-Vishniac, MacMaster University (formerly from Johns Hopkins University) who was one of the presenters at the conference. And the question is relevant; in nine out of ten times no action is taken when an alarm goes off, except for turning the alarm off.

Continue reading "Alarms in hospitals – a chaotic sound environment" »

Posted by Katrin Bergmark at 1:09 PM | Permalink

Interview with John Hinton OBE
President of the Institute of Acoustics

Regarding Euronoise 2009, Edinburgh, Scotland 26-28 October 2009.
www.euronoise2009.org.uk
Email:euronoise2009@ioa.org.uk

By Colin Campbell, Concept Developer - Education, Ecophon UK and Ireland

Posted by Marc Janssen at 9:03 PM | Permalink

Posted by Marc Janssen at 8:59 PM | Permalink

Noise levels in hospitals are typically more than 15 dB(A) higher than target values given in guidelines (for example target values from WHO and the US Environmental Protection Agency). Furthermore, noise is often one of the top complaints from staff and patients. This is concluded in a review made by Hui Xie and Jian Kang at the University of Sheffield.

Continue reading "Influence of noise on patient’s sleep" »

Posted by Marc Janssen at 8:25 PM | Permalink

Directly after the session on healthcare and acoustics this afternoon we had a little talk with Dr Michael Phiri, one of the presenters.

Dr.Michael Phiri is Senior Research Fellow in the School of Architecture at the University of Sheffield.

By Marc Janssen, Concept Developer - Healthcare, Ecophon.

Posted by Marc Janssen at 8:28 PM | Permalink

Open office acoustics is today probably one of the most active architectural acoustics areas in terms of standardization.
Several standards, both national and international provide us with a powerful set of descriptors.

Interview (1,47 minutes) with Pierre Chigot, Concept Developer - Offices, Ecophon France.

By Tina Frisbæk Jensen, Concept Developer - Offices, Ecophon Denmark.

Posted by Marc Janssen at 9:38 AM | Permalink

I am Tobias Angelbeck, Concept Developer for Acoustics in Health Care Premises, Ecophon Germany. I talked to Dr. Jo Solet – the clinical Instructor at the Harvard Medical School, Department of Psychiatry, Cambridge, MA (USA).

Right now she and her department are doing two researches.
One is a behavioural research project related to patients exposure to noise, with an outcome on measure of medical views.
The other is a virtual hospital in a neuroscience lab, studying how patients respond to specific real stimuli in a hospital environment.

Continue reading "Every decibel counts!" »

Posted by Marc Janssen at 3:50 PM | Permalink

Interview (3,35 minutes)

By Marc Janssen / Concept Developer - Healthcare, Ecophon.

Posted by Marc Janssen at 3:19 PM | Permalink

Tor Halmrast

Mr Tor Halmrast from Norway had a very interesting lecture about how to measure reverberation time, and how important it is to be a good “cougher”.

Tor works with music and acoustics. When he is on holiday, he often finds interesting rooms what he wants to measure. To measure room acoustic parameters today requires a lot of equipment that you seldom bring with you. That is why Mr Halmrast bought a small Wav-recorder and some balloons.

Continue reading "Simplified room acoustic measurement" »

Posted by Marc Janssen at 3:19 PM | Permalink

It's 30 degrees and sunny so we choose to walk instead of taking the metro as we've been indoors allday. We wait to cross the traffic - it's noisy with horns beeping, busy with mopeds screeching by and hot but there is much to enjoy. Cutting through the backstreets we see some lovely buildings, markets and wary of crossing the busy roads even on a green man.

It's become quieter and we are conscious that Paris families are home eating while we walk past the open windows. Closer to the hotel children are out playing and enjoying a splash in the nearby fountains.It's a comfort to be living in a quieter area........

By Colin Campbell, Concept Developer - Education, Ecophon UK and Ireland.

Posted by Marc Janssen at 2:47 PM | Permalink

An interview (2,44 minutes) with C.J Ostendorf (Senior Projectleader) from Cauberg-Huygen Raadgevende Ingenieurs BV in Maastricht and Jack B. Evans (President) JEA Acoustics in Austin Texas.

By Marc Janssen, Concept Developer - Health Care, Ecophon.

Posted by Marc Janssen at 12:48 PM | Permalink

Professor Kang has been involved in many acoustic research projects with the University of Sheffield, and speaks to Acoustic Bulletin on his recent and current research in Healthcare environments and summarises his presentation entitled "A Systematic Review of the Influence of Noise on Patients Sleep in Intensive Care Units".

By Anthony Thomas, Concept Developer - Healthcare, Ecophon UK and Ireland.

Listen to the interview (3,04 minutes).

Posted by Marc Janssen at 9:20 AM | Permalink

Claus Christensen works with research and development of the room acoustics software, Odeon. Odeon is a tool for room acoustic design and it helps you predicting the acoustic quality of spaces. This modelling software is also an auralisation tool allowing you to listen to how it will sound. Claus sees acoustic conferences as indeed important for meeting potential customers, receiving input from users and to upgrade his own knowledge and follow the latest development.

For more information on Odeon go to www.odeon.dk

By Carsten Svensson, Concept Developer - Education, Ecophon.

Posted by Marc Janssen at 8:39 AM | Permalink

Katrin Bergmark, Concept Developer - Healthcare, Ecophon Sweden.

This question formed the introduction to the overview of acoustic standards in Europe presented by Katrin Bergmark, Concept Developer at Ecophon in Sweden. Katrin talked about the current situation regarding sound in health care premises. Hospitals are often experienced as very noisy, leading to health effects on both patients and staff. In order to create a supporting sound environment we should aim to:
- secure privacy
- lower the noise levels
- facilitate good communication

And develop standards accordingly...
Click here to read Katrin's paper

Continue reading "Why do we need standards?" »

Posted by Marc Janssen at 3:29 PM | Permalink

Take a look at some snapshots from the exhibition part of the conference!
If you want to see Ecophon's booth, you need to look at the other show!

Posted by Marc Janssen at 3:06 PM | Permalink

This morning at 09:20 the session called healthcare acoustics & speech privacy – international perspectives started. Chaired by William Cavanaugh , David Sykes and Kerstin Persson Waye, the session provided an overview of emerging policies around the world.

Some of the conclusions are that the development of acoustic standards and guidelines for Healthcare facilities is really accelerating. David Sykes of ASA highlighted several waves of technological, economical and social trends that are responsible for that.

Continue reading "This morning's summary - speech privacy in healthcare premises" »

Posted by Marc Janssen at 3:04 PM | Permalink

Posted by Marc Janssen at 3:01 PM | Permalink

Posted by Marc Janssen at 8:08 PM | Permalink

Erling Nilsson, Acoustic Specialist, Ecophon.

Some reflections on the afternoon's session about acoustic for open-plan spaces. It was interesting to note that there exists some consencus concerning evaluation of the acoustical conditions in open-plan spaces. Measures like DL2 and DLf were frequently used in the presentations as well as methods for transforming these values into user friendly descriptors like e.g. radius of comfort. A good start of the conference and it will be really interesting to take part of coming events at one of the largest conferences ever.

Posted by Marc Janssen at 7:52 PM | Permalink

Already today the temperature was as expected in Paris during summer.
Perfect weather that is, please find here the forecast for July 1st.

Posted by Marc Janssen at 7:33 PM | Permalink

Posted by Marc Janssen at 4:31 PM | Permalink

Ecophon has been invitated to present several papers at Acoustics '08.Below you'll find a list of presenters, Click on the names to see their abstracts:

- Erling Nilsson
- Carsten Svensson
- Katrin Bergmark
- Marc Janssen
- Pierre Chigot
- Gerhard Tiesler/Markus Oberdoerster (Mr. Tiesler will present)

Posted by Marc Janssen at 8:25 AM | Permalink

As the summer is coming nearer, so is the conference Acoustics'08 in Paris. The number of registrations is amazingly high already and growing every day. Just some facts and numbers about the conference:

Number of participants: 3777
Number of participating countries: 66
Number of abstracts: 3580
Number of oral sessions: 263
Number of poster sessions: 167

Click here to see how many of your countrymen are participating

Where will you be the first week of July? You can still register.
We hope to see you at Acoustics'08.

Posted by Marc Janssen at 12:00 PM | Permalink

The organisers of the acoustic conference “Acoustics’08 Paris” have just published the full programme on the conference website. To save you time exploring we have put together some quick links. Please find them below.

Planned sessions per day of the week (
To see all scheduled sessions per day click here and (and then click on technical programme).
Time Schedule per day
If you have the session codes check the exact time-schedule

Continue reading "Acoustics' 08 programme online now!" »

Posted by Marc Janssen at 10:20 AM | Permalink

55th Open Seminar on Acoustics - most important annual acoustic conference in Poland will be organised this year by PTA's (Polish Acoustical Society) Wrocław section.
Conference will start on September the 8th in Piechowice near Szklarska Poręba and is planned for 5 days.
You can find more information on conference web page: english and polish version.

Posted by Mikołaj Jarosz at 12:26 AM | Permalink

On November 27th to December 1st 2007 the Acoustical Society of America held one of it's two annual meetings in New Orleans, Louisiana. Interesting areas covered in the conference were Speech communication, Speech perception, Architectural Acoustics, Education in acoustics and Noise. Hot items in acoustics in US right now are privacy in healthcare and environmental oriented programs like LEED.

Continue reading "Meeting with the Acoustical Society of America." »

Posted by Nils-Åke Andersson at 10:33 AM | Permalink

From June 29th till July 4th 2008 “Acoustics’08 Paris” will be held in the Palais des Congrès in Paris. The conference is being organized by the ASA, the EAA and the Société Française d’Acoustique (SFA). It will bring together experts from all fields of acoustics from around the world.

Room acoustics in schools, offices AND health care facilities

Besides sessions on room acoustics in schools and offices, this conference will also strongly focus on sound in Health Care facilities. Erica Ryherd (Georgia institute of Technology) and Marc Janssen (Ecophon Group) will chair one of the health care related sessions.

Continue reading "HAVE YOU REGISTERED FOR ACOUSTICS'08 IN PARIS?" »

Posted by Marc Janssen at 9:13 AM | Permalink

Take the opportunity to stay in touch with the latest regarding school acoustics! The Speech and Hearing Group within the UK Institute of Acoustics (IOA) organise a meeting on speech and hearing in learning environments (29 January 2008) in London. If you want to know the programme and how to register, click here for the programme!

Posted by Carsten Svensson at 4:02 PM | Permalink

Posted by Marc Janssen at 12:30 PM | Permalink

Mike Barron from the University of Bath, UK, asks himself “when is a concert hall too quiet”? Sound levels in concert halls decrease with distance, but assessment of subjective loudness indicates that loudness judgement is more or less independent of distance from the stage. This leads to the conclusion that listeners compensate their judgement of loudness on the basis of what they see. So people at the back of the hall may compensate for the distance from the source!

Posted by Carsten Svensson at 12:10 PM | Permalink

Alexis Kurtz from Arup Acoustics in New York presented a paper on the issue of sustainable and/or green buildings. She exposed a valuable overview of various green building rating systems globally. Sustainable design covers more than just environmental aspects – it also includes economic and societal benefits, she claims. Acoustics is often not included, leading to poor acoustic conditions in green buildings.

An overview of current rating systems for green buildings:

BREEM
LEED
Green Guide for Health Care (GGHC)
HQE
CASBEE (in English)

Posted by Carsten Svensson at 10:52 AM | Permalink

Ruud Geerligs

The new Dutch Practical Guideline NPR 3438 was recently published and released. This guideline (or standard) covers the field of acoustic ergonomics and gives target values for the room acoustical environment in relation to disturbance of concentration and communication. NPR 3438 can be used for building and housing projects covering building types like offices, schools, sports halls, hospitals etc. Ruud Geerligs from SBR (Building Research Institute) in Netherlands presented a paper on this new Dutch guideline at ICA 2007 in Madrid (19th International Congress on Acoustics) together with Carsten Svensson from Saint-Gobain Ecophon. Ruud highlighted the background and the content of the Practical Guideline in one of the sessions.

Listen to the interview with Ruud Geerligs

Posted by Carsten Svensson at 10:02 AM | Permalink

Markus Oberdörster and Gerhart Tiesler

The acoustic environment of classrooms has a significant impact on new modern teaching scenarios. Today, in many countries, education and teaching is becoming more student centred and differentiated. Classrooms that might have worked well for decades might have to be acoustically “updated”. Markus Oberdörster from Ecophon Germany, together with Gerhart Tiesler from ISF University of Bremen in Germany, spent years investigating the room acoustic conditions of a large amount of German classrooms. Markus talked about acoustics and teaching styles, but also questioned the relevance of Sabine’s formula in non-diffuse conditions and reverberation time as the only acoustic descriptor to use. Gerhart took this further by revealing data on how poor room acoustics has an impact on teacher’s workload, i.e. heart rate as stress indicator. The consequence of acoustically good classrooms is reducing the stressor “noise”, giving higher activation, reducing fatigue and potentially better learning results by the students.

Posted by Carsten Svensson at 9:08 AM | Permalink

An international symposium on room acoustics was held in Sevilla , 10 - 12 September. The event was organised as an satellit symposium to the 19th International Congress on Acoustics in Madrid. Leading experties from all over the world presented "state of the art" in different field of room acoustics. The program consist of 6 keynote lectures and about 75 contributed papers. The main topics of the symposium were

Open air spaces acoustics
Design and room acoustics
Room acoustics simulation
Worship building acoustics

The keynotes lectures cover areas like auditory spatial impression in concert halls, the important role of the seat rows of the Hellenistic Theatre of Epidaurus, acoustics in churches, coupled rooms, room acoustics in virtual reality and finally, room acoustic simulations of multi-source environments. The first keynote lecture given by prof. Masayuki Morimoto was an excellent presentation of spatial and temporal structures and spectra of reflections on auditory source width and listener envelopment.

Saint-Gobain Ecophon AB presented two papers at the symposium concerning classroom acoustic:
Classroom acoustic measurement and evaluation, Nils-Åke Andersson and Erling Nilsson. Download file
Sound decay and steady-state level in rooms with ceiling treatment, Erling Nilsson and Nils-Åke Andersson. Download file

Posted by Erling Nilsson at 8:41 AM | Permalink

Emma Greenland, Bridget Shield, Markus Oberdörster

Listen to a caption of Markus Oberdörster's presentation on classroom acoustics:

Posted by Marc Janssen at 3:07 PM | Permalink

Alternative room acoustic descriptors for open offices
- progresses in standardization
Pierre Chigot, Saint-Gobain Ecophon SA, France

Pierre Chigot, Saint-Gobain Ecophon France

Pierre Chigot explained us about the limitations regarding the use of Reverberation Time for acoustical assessment of open-plan offices. Large variance between measurement positions at low frequencies and poor reactivity to changes in the acoustics due to the lack of diffusivity of the room is often seen.

As potential new acoustic descriptors in open offices the sound propagation from workstation to workstation, rate of spatial decay per doubling of distance (DL2) was suggested. DL2 has originally been applied to workrooms (through EN ISO 14257).
DL2 seems to be a consistent and reliable descriptor of open plan office acoustics and is now included in sound quality standards for buildings. A standard for field measurements of DL2 is needed, taking into consideration the physical characteristics of open plan offices, as well as speech characteristics (increased energy contents at low frequencies, voice levels, raised hearing sensitivity at high frequencies, etc).

Posted by Marc Janssen at 11:37 AM | Permalink

During the conference several persons are interviewed, some of them we even filmed. You can listen to or read the available interviews already and some movies taken during lectures will be available as well.

Check for updates regularly

INTERVIEWS
- John Bradley

- Sabine Schlittmeier

- Valtteri Hongisto

- Ruud Geerligs

- Markus Oberdörster

MOVIES
Infromation and availability will follow later

Posted by Marc Janssen at 11:00 AM | Permalink

Have a look at some more summaries on open-plan office acoustics.

"Determination of acoustic conditions in open offices and suggestions for acoustic classification"
Valtteri Hongisto, Finnish Institute of Occupational Health, Turku, Finland

DL2 and “radius of distraction” as the future acoustic descriptors in open offices?

Speech privacy and the distraction efficiency of surrounding speech can be described by the speech intelligibility between workstations. Valtteri Hongisto stated that previous laboratory and field studies have concentrated on two neighbouring workstations while examination should instead concern the whole office space since noise complaints are not restricted to the nearest workstation. A new method to determine the acoustical conditions of the whole office space, including both short and long distances from the speaker was introduced. Through measurements in 15 offices Dl2 and “radius of distraction” were determined as principal descriptors. The measurements included background noise level, spatial decay of Speech
Transmission Index, STI, and spatial decay of A-weighted sound level of speech.

Listen to a caption of Valtteri's lecture

Continue reading "More open-plan office acoustics" »

Posted by Marc Janssen at 10:00 AM | Permalink

The world population has been multiplied by 1000 in 10.000 years.

It's obvious that if we want to safeguard the quality of living for future generations, we need to show environmental awareness and take meausres already today. A definition of sustainability is meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

“Acoustics ad the UK perspective on sustainable acoustics “
Peter Rogers - Cole Jarman Associates

According to Peter Rogers, associate at Cole Jarman Associates, sustainable acoustics is about appplying the principles of acoustics to remove the problems that obstruct a “One planet” or “sustainable” solution. During his presentation he showed 3 ways representing the UK approach regarding sustainability and acoustics.

• Regulations increasing (BB93)
• BREEAM assessments (download the factsheet)
• Code for sustainable homes

Rogers gave an overview of the situation in the UK and explained about the BREEAM's assessment for the performance of buildings. His answer to the question "What can acoustician do?", was as following.
• educate themselves and those in other disciplines about what we know so far about human aural effects on comfort, health and happiness
• perform research
• create benchmarks
• raise awareness
• share progress

Posted by Marc Janssen at 10:00 PM | Permalink

Sofar, so good.
The postive summer vibrations of the city of Madrid (35 degrees celsius) is definately also reflected on the mood of the participants of the conference. Sofar around 1500 people have registered.

Please find some pictures of the days sofar

Posted by Marc Janssen at 8:19 PM | Permalink

Reported from ICA Madrid

John Bradley - National Research Council, Montreal

Better speech privacy in open-plan offices can be most consistently achieved by a combination of quantitative design procedures and validation measurements, says John Bradley. This has not usually been done in the past because of the lack of convenient design and measurement tools. While signal-to-noise type measures such as the Articulation Index have been used to indicate the amount of speech privacy in North American offices, often Speech Transmission Index values have been used in European offices.

Piere Chigot interviewed John after his presentations
Listen to the interview (preferably use headphones or loudspeakers)

Continue reading ""How you improve speech privacy in open-plan offices"" »

Posted by Marc Janssen at 6:43 PM | Permalink

Acoustic environment in Finnish offices, the summary of questionnaire studies
Riikka Helenius, Finnish Institute of Occupational Health

The result from a recent office study including 8 Finnish offices were presented. The acoustical conditions of the 8 offices represented typical Finnish offices. Noise and thermal conditions were experienced as the most disturbing work environment factors. The most distracting sound sources...