Goal: to insulate a building's occupants from noise between units and noise from the building's surroundings.

Building acoustics have a direct affect on occupants- whether it's an educational facility, concert hall, or apartment building. Each building has it's unique requirements and these need to be met with careful planning and detail. Whether a building is designed to DIN 4109 or VDI 4100 (both demanding German specifications), increased sound protection can make a difference in sleep quality, especially in the urban environment.

Acoustics is the most mathematics-intensive discipline in construction. There are twelve paths that sound impact waves can travel from any given room to the next, plus one direct path. We add up the sum of the 13 paths to calculate the sound resistance between the two adjacent rooms. The formula looks like this:

We do that 12 times, and plug that into the next one:

We go through a lot of pencils.

Challenge: construction details more often than not neglect transmission of sound waves- properly done, a much higher quality construction is the result.