Creative forms of Room Acoustic Treatment in Teachings Spaces

BB93 ’Acoustic Design for schools’ provides a range of target reverberation times for teaching spaces.  These reverberation times are aimed at ensuring acceptable speech intelligibility levels, as well as reducing excessive levels of noise increase within teaching spaces.

Dartington Primary School is an inspiring development because a solid timber construction system has been used.  Exposed timber in combination with barn shaped classrooms offered the potential to add interesting forms of room acoustic treatments.  The solution used was several acoustic beams provided by MACH Products.

Acoustic beams are a highly effective way of absorbing sound within a room and have the additional benefit of being complementary to the architectural design of a space. Acoustics beams are more effective that flat products since absorption is offered by both sides of the beam.

To assess the required levels of room acoustic treatment, a sophisticated acoustic model was built which allowed the amount of treatment required in each teaching space to be accurately predicted. The Ray tracing model enabled the dimensions of each beam (principally its height) to be adjusted, such to meet BB93 requirements.

As in the case of all MACH Acoustics consultancy, a full design review of room acoustic treatments was presented.  Our acoustic consultancy resulted in a design report, providing a wide range of design options and ideas.  This report can be downloaded here.