Noise Reduction in Open Public Spaces

My wife and I were sitting at the bar at one of our favorite brunch spots last Sunday. During our conversation, she turned to me and told me to stop shouting in her ear. This, of course, led to me speaking more softly in my normal speaking voice. She told me to stop joking around because now she couldn’t understand what I was saying. As a result of providing noise reduction solutions every day, I started explaining what was happening. I realized that this would be a great topic for a blog. So here goes…

Noise Reduction Solutions

A question that is frequently asked of me by people with noisy public spaces who are considering an absorptive solution is “How many decibels of noise reduction will we get from this solution?” There really isn’t a clear-cut number we can put to this, and here’s why.

When you have an environment where most of the surfaces around us are hard, sound will bounce around and stay in the air for quite a while. Meanwhile, other sounds are joining them and “muddying up” the ambient sound around you. This makes it difficult to understand others when carrying on a conversation. So, we tend to speak more loudly in order to be heard more clearly. Sound absorptive products like our AlphaSorb^® Fabric Wrapped Acoustic Panel, Sonex^® Valueline Hanging Baffle, Whisperwave^® Ceiling Cloud, or PolyPhon™ Polyester Acoustic Panels take the energy out of sound waves and stop them from bouncing. The original sounds being created aren’t really reduced in volume from their sources, but their duration and distance they travel are greatly reduced. This provides an additional psychological result in that we now (as a group) tend to speak more softly as we can now understand others easily.

The net result is a much more intimate quiet setting that provides comfort and privacy in your personal space.