It doesn't talk about it much but...Apartment noise from neighbors. Oh. My. Gosh.
I live in an area where many expensive, luxury apartments have been built in the last few years and every single one of them have complaints from "hearing the person above me set the toilet seat down" for example.
I now base what apartment I live in by the thickness and sound isolation of the walls and ceilings/floors.
I lived in a complex built in the 80's. It's dead silent. I can jump up and down on my floor and the neighbor below me will never hear. Now in a newer complex, I can't walk across my hardwood floored kitchen without knowing my neighbor will hear every footstep. I have to take the people above me a bottle of wine and ask them kindly to try and not make as much noise as it sounds like they are moving furniture ALL THE TIME. Even though it's not their fault...and they really aren't moving furniture every evening...They are just walking around...
Architects, engineers, whoever...please, please, please, stop skimping out on noise insulation in new construction. You are creating a whole generation of buildings that are awful to live in. My next apartment, I have no idea what I'm going to do...the tour ends right away for me when I hear thumps from above the second I walk into the room.
I seriously shouldn't and don't want to know every time the couple next to me has sex or the guys on the other side of me are watching a loud action movie.
I would pay so much more in rent per month for a place that had more sound insulation. Take note building developers. I WILL PAY MORE.
I wrote about this on Quora [1] some time ago. Here are the highlights on some ways to check if the unit you're touring has an above average acoustical design without just making noise in an adjacent unit:
(1) Is the floor construction concrete and steel or a wood joist system. The concrete/steel building type is preferred. A caveat is if it is a "loft" style with no ceiling (drywall, etc) and is open to the concrete structure for reasons I'll describe at the end.
(2) Ask if the apartment building was designed to convert to condos at some point. If the potential conversion was known during design, an acoustics professional may have been involved.
(3) Is the space marketed as "luxury?" While dangerous to trust marketing this much, if legitimately so, should have "above norm" acoustical separation between spaces.
(4) Pull a wall plate off a switch that's in a demising wall between units and look for fiberglass in the wall cavity around the edges of the backbox. You may be able to knock on walls and tell if they're hollow or fiberglass filled. If you find two layers of drywall between the plate and backbox, that's a good sign.
(5) Often the bathroom/toilet plumbing is along the corridor wall in newer buildings. Can you hear the water running from the corridor? If so, you can expect to hear the neighbors' plumbing above your unit too. Listen for water hissing in the walls while you run the kitchen sink.
Yes there's noise through walls from adjacent neighbors, but be aware of impact noises above. If floors are hard (not carpet) expect to hear footfall noise unless a resilient underlayment was properly installed in the units and/or the ceiling is isolated in the unit below. If the unit has hardwood floors, check for a gap between the baseboard trim and the floor by running a business card between. If it doesn't fit, then the resilient floor is compromised and your neighbors below are likely to hear your footfalls, and chances are you will hear your neighbors' above too.
I guess you should just make sure the sound reduction standard is part of the specs.
The country where I live (Germany) uses a pretty simple rule to reduce the number of court cases for sound protection issues like this - a certain standard is considered "state of the art", and if a developer wants to deviate from it he needs to specify it explicitly in the contract. For residential multi-tenant buildings, state of the art is considered what is specified in class II in DIN norm 4109 appendix 2. that stated a minimum reduction of 55 DB for walls and ceilings under a certain measurement regime, and a maximum level of 25 DB for technical installments in the building, among other things.
I moved into such a building lately, and most of the times (like now) it is dead silent to the point you can listen to the clock ticking. If a baby cries at night in the floor above, it can be audible, but not to the point where one gets woken up. Overall it is a good compromise that is as good or better to the places I lived in previously.
There are three potential problems that we frequently come across:
1. Many building developers just don't care, so long as the structure meets minimum code (which is typically based on the International Building Code model standard of STC 50)
2. Many building developers (and architects) may care, but don't have the knowledge to pull it off. They may even design sound insulation measures based on existing designs, but may not be aware that a particular detail difference between the reference design and their design may render the the sound insulation moot.
3. The developers and/or architects may care and may have the knowledge to properly design the structure, but the contractors either don't care or don't have the knowledge to construct the building properly leading to short-circuits or substitutions the render the sound insulation design useless.
I toured an apartment building several years ago that had 2-story units, where a unit's living space was on top of it's bedrooms, so a cross-section of the building would look something like:
Unit C living space
Unit C bedrooms
Unit B living space
Unit B bedrooms
Unit A living space
Unit A bedrooms
This means that the space directly above one's bedrooms - their very own living space - was less likely to be occupied while they were sleeping. Seemed like a very ingenious design to me.
My life has taken me to live in SFHs now, so I don't really look at a lot of apartment buildings anymore, but I've never seen another building with this design.
I'm single. I ended up in a house solely because every shared living space tried had serious noise issues.
I don't need all this room -- nor the maintenance. But I am most reluctant to share walls, ceiling, even a floor with someone else, ever again. Even if it's quiet, moving in, who knows what you're going to get next month, year?
Urban planners want us to live more densely and "efficiently." My primary response: Fix the noise problems. Then we can talk.
This resonates (!?) with me. For 10 years or so noise from above was perhaps the single most annoying thing in my life. You can adapt to a continuous noise, but intermittent stomping ... oy vey. If I ever go back to apartment living, somehow ensuring this is not a problem (if you are just viewing it's hard to know whether pleasant quietness is temporary or permanent) is my number one priority.
I noticed this when I lived in a 12 story concrete cinderblock in Crystal city Virginia. I never once heard my neighbors. It was literally concrete between every floor. Then I moved out to Fairfax Virginia into a newer, plywood construction. I could hear my neighbors quite well. Newer buildings used cheaper materials, and as such sound travels easily.
> I would pay so much more in rent per month for a place that had more sound insulation. Take note building developers. I WILL PAY MORE.
I wonder where you live. I live in a under-developed nation with bad real-estate and there is a good number of building with special noise isolation. Granted, they are double the price. Not only because of noise isolation, they come with other perks (security, pool, quality of materials...).
If you are living in a 2million+ city, my guess this kind of estate already exists. Maybe you should search better.
> Architects, engineers, whoever...please, please, please, stop skimping out on noise insulation in new construction.
Noise isolation is expensive. Owners and developers rarely want to pay for it. The problem is rarely the architect/engineer, the problem is that it's an expensive up-front design+construction cost, and also difficult to achieve after construction.
They don't care. The bottom dollar is all they care about. Even new single family custom construction will be built like crap if you don't ride them hard and pay premium prices.
The only quiet low/mid rise buildings built now are the precast concrete building (think Hampton inn). They only get built that way because of the building codes.
I vaguely recall reading an article summarising research that found that one of the overlooked methods of reducing crime in densely populated cities was better sound insulation.
The problem is that it rarely is a direct cause, except in rare crime passionnel situations. However, there's a measurable indirect effect when you add up the extra irritation, lack of sleep, etc. which affects all inhabitants of an apartment block. The consequences are measurable when you look at the "average".
I can remember looking at a new build apartment in Bath (UK) and having my wife go next door and talk loudly. We walked away from it. Building regs are minimum standards.
A friend forwarded this article to me about a half-hour ago. After reading the article a few times, my feelings are a little mixed.
Yes, sound matters. Sound can help to characterize an environment. But I read some of the quotes in the article ("We need reverberation", "The beauty of the high ceilings and big windows was amplified, and humanized, by the scratching of chairs and the clomp-clomp of boots on hardwood floors", "There can be privacy in a crowd" etc) and I hope that architects don't come away with the message "background noise is good, silence is bad" because that's not the case.
Look at the Grand Central terminal example - yes, the high ceilings and reverberant background helps to create an atmosphere of a "great metropolis." But it also hurts the intelligibility of conversations and the PA system. You're trading acoustic comfort for atmosphere. The non-native English speaker or hearing-impared patron is not going to appreciate the atmosphere when they miss their train because they couldn't understand the PA announcement that departure platform has changed.
Similarly, yes a room sounds very different when a window is open. Sometimes you need that background noise. I remember being in a bedroom that was so quiet I could hear the blood flowing through my ears. I had to open a window to let in the natural sound to I didn't go crazy. On the other hand, you may not want that sound of sirens coming in at 3am when you, or your newborn, is trying to get some sleep.
I guess my recommendation hasn't changed - hire an acoustician! :)
Honestly, that library reading room sounds terrible. I should not have to hear chairs on the floor. And like you, I don't want the terminal to reverberate, I want it to be functional and welcoming.
I'm not looking for the acoustic atmosphere of a place to reassure me that that place is high-status. I think that the author of TFA does have that need.
On a similar note... some of us are noise def... I can't really make out anything but the loudest sound in an environment like that... most conversations I don't get anything if the person isn't facing me, and even then it's only if their lip movements are enough of a key to get what they're saying... I have an inhuman sense of smell, but less-than-average vision, and piss-poor aural perception.
The harder part, is that rough surfaces that tend to mute the "loud" tend to collect a lot more dust and be harder to clean properly/regularly at scale, which is another concern for some spaces.
I moved from a Dallas, TX suburb to a pretty "nice" place in Brooklyn, NY last June.
Holy shit, the things that people think of as normal and okay here are totally nuts.
I never heard a damn sound from anything in Dallas. Nothing. I could play my classical music pretty much as loud as I wanted whenever I wanted, and neighbors would never hear it.
Here in Brooklyn, I swear to god we live like animals, and people are okay with it.
I got a noise complaint with cops and everything the other day just having reasonably quiet sex with my girlfriend. Neither of us is noisy.
I can hear everything above and below and next to me. It's stupid. There's no central heat/ac. The building just turns on the heat when they feel like it, which is nuts. It's more than 80 degrees in my apt right now. I don't even like that temp ever. I have to open windows to let it cold air to bring the temp down to something reasonable.
There are no reasonable grocery store. If you want to cook a reasonable meal at home with your own cooking skills, you have to go to at least 5 different places, and there's nothing about a store that tells you what you can and can't get there. It's insane. And they don't tell you with a sign on the the door if they are or are not cash only.
I love the opportunities I've found in NYC, and am truly loving my job, but the tradeoffs are fucking terrible. Aside from public transportation, this is the worst, most idiotic city in the world.
Seriously, it's like living as an animal here.
And I live in one of the best parts of Brooklyn. This is just stupid, and I kind of hate it.
I just want to say: that was the most beautiful article-reading experience I've ever had on a publisher's website.
No sidebars, suggestions, social buttons or anything...just quality content presented cleanly with just enough branding and functionality. The moving images with the sound was an excellent touch, and although it's specific to the purpose of this article, I love the idea of looping moving images that aren't obnoxious and add to the content.
I don't read the NYT very much, so I apologize if this is something that's been around for a while.
EDIT: I had loaded the site with Ad Block turned on...so I didn't see the social buttons. Frankly even those are done very elegantly, and if I were a user of those social networks, perhaps I'd even appreciate them.
I wish people spoke more about noise insulation in apartments.
If I don't have a baby, I don't want to be woken up in the middle of the night by crying babies. If I don't have any children, I don't want to hear them yelling all day long.
In my newly built house, I asked for the master bedroom wall to be soundproofed with rockwool and its inner door to be solid wood. It works incredibly well, and it makes the house appear bigger: If someone's watching TV in the living room, I can just go to the master bedroom and shut the door and there's incredible silence.
I did this because as a teenager I always struggled with privacy in my parent's house. Even though the house wasn't small, it was hard to have a conversation with my girlfriend without it being heard in the nearby rooms (my parents rarely watched TV, so there was no sound to mask my voice).
If I ever get the chance to build another house, I will specify rockwool insulation in all inner walls and all-around solid doors. In that way, I can have a small house with great privacy. Or I can study while someone else is watching a movie with surround sound in the adjacent room with no problem.
If you had a baby, you wouldn't want them woken up in the middle of their nap by someone coming home and turning on a TV, closing a door, or something else equally normal. If you had children, you'd want them to have a quiet place to study and rest, even when the twenty-something neighbors are throwing a raucous party.
I think most people, including parents, both don't want to be disturbed and don't want to disturb others.
The New York Times recently ran an article detailing the attention, expertise and cost it takes to properly sound-proof an apartment:
"The engineer tested the penthouse to find the problematic noise frequencies, then used accelerometers to measure the shaking. She determined which noises were airborne and which were from vibration. With that information she was able to specify materials and construction methods that would hush the rattle and hum.
Throughout the 3,500-square-foot apartment, pipes and ducts were wrapped in acoustic barrier insulation, walls and ceilings were hung on vibration-absorbing rails and floating floors were installed, at a total cost of about $200,000.
...
The solution is seldom as simple as adding insulation. Noise is insidious. No two room hums are exactly alike, and what silences one might make another worse. 'What a contractor did across town that worked 99 percent of the time might not work for you,' said Alan Fierstein, an acoustical consultant who owns a 39-year-old New York firm called Acoustilog."
I believe New York, or any other crowded big city, like Shanghai or Beijing is hardly the model of how things should sound.
After having lived in those cities I enjoy a lot living in places like Switzerland or Spain where there is silence or people in a much more natural way, like small buildings with pedestrian only streets.
All this background noises in big cities are just cars thermal engine vibration. I hate it. You go to savanna and you see 6 ton elephants that sound very weak because nature is efficient.
Having been dealing with some sound problems lately: I have to observe that American cities are loud compared to most overseas cities in my experience. Everything about them is louder, and I'm not sure why or how it got that way, and why it isn't seen as something to remedy. Particularly when we want to encourage increased density and inner city living. While attacking the problem through better design and insulation is one way I also think we need to look at the amount of noise produced outside too.
A townhouse I used to live in had a two-story open area with a loft for working. It looked terrific, but sounded like a bus station, with awful echoes. Adding curtains helped some, but nothing could be done about all the flat drywall surfaces. I'm thinking that the houses of the 30's-50's, with all the built-ins, were better for this because they broke up the flat surfaces, and thus the echos.
I just moved into a classic MCM house which has a ton of built-ins (I should post some pictures when I get a chance) and although the house has really high, angled ceilings and a very open concept floor plan, it's surprisingly quiet.
You can hang a /lot/ of diffusors and add bass traps and the interior soundscape will change and feel more intimate (and your TV/stereo will magically sound better!)
But that doesn't change exterior noise transmission.
When I was studying Architecture I did a group research project around this very idea, but limited it to public space in cities (particularly the one I was in at the time).
We took many recordings in Parks, Retail heavy streets, Business centers (on the weekend), tourist areas etc... We asked people to listen to the recordings and rate things like "Does this space feel Cold or Warm"? As well as asking them to draw a diagram of what they imagined (which is a whole other area of interesting research that I can't remember the name of off the top of my head).
Going through the literature, and more scientific studies, the short history is it's thought we evolved to associate loud, bass sounds, (which are less directional and imply larger masses) with danger (eg, thunder, large earth movements), which can lead to an increased amount of cortisol expression in children. It's less pronounced in adults suggesting that we get used to it when we realise it's not a real threat (CBT).
One paper looked at school children near Heathrow Airport vs. in a similar urban area with no air-traffic. The former had much higher cortisol levels generally and performed worse academically after adjusting for other environmental factors. Another looked at offices and the effect of HVAC systems droning away 9-5 (ever noticed when the HVAC goes off at work?)
What we found in our limited study was what you would expect; Places with live background music rated much more favorably. The stand out was Circular Quay (this was Sydney), where there were a lot of buskers and performers interspersed with happy sounding chatter from passes by.
Outdoor areas that reverberate (Martin Place on the weekend with skateboarders) as you can imagine didn't rate too well.
Not really groundbreaking by any means, but designing space means designing for everything we experience; light, sound, tactility, temporality.
p.s
One of the problems with traditional Architectural education is that it's hard to convey sound design through a visual-centric presentation style, so not many bother. Movement, whether implied or explicit, was always important to me in my designs and relatively easy to visually communicate (animation etc). If I ever go back to finish and become a real Architect, sound will probably be just as important, luckily VR is now at a stage with entry price and skill level where faithfully constructing the sonic profile of a space should be possible and easily communicable.
Relating to background noise, in case anyone else finds these useful, my pair of Etymotic earphones [1] have been doing an excellent job of cutting out basically everything. The kids version is pretty cheap (for a mid-range earphone), and apparently differs only in that it's slightly smaller and has a higher impedance (so you may require an amplifier).
Two things that Etymotics earphones cannot block: the sounds of your own mouth (like chewing) which are greatly increased by plugging your ears, and the scratching sounds of the earphones own wires, especially on the ER4 with the twisted wires that rub together.
Is it possible in browsers to turn off mouse events during scroll? This article uses it to good effect but in general the effect is very annoying. For instance on many websites when using the mousewheel to scroll you land up with the cursor over an element (lets say a map) and now suddenly you are scrolling the map instead without intending to.
The architects of the Hong Kong airport paid a lot of attention to sound I think. The ceiling is very high but there are panels that are at various angles that help reduce reflections. The first time I visited I noticed it right away. As a result I've found the airport to be a very peaceful space. It's calming and relaxing.
Reminds me of when I used to live in SF.
moved into a building that was built in 2005;
thought they'd factor in the 120+ dB measured on streets.
I was wrong. Didn't really sleep for the first 2 months.
Choppers grunting past, hobos fighting with chains. Fun.
My dad is an architect, he once challenged me to find some area of study that architect's don't potentially need to know something about. I still haven't come up with one.
What counts as an area of study? Integrated circuit design? Astrobiology? Nuclear fusion? Veterinary medicine? History of warfare? Textile manufacturing? I'd definitely like to hear his some of his answers. Heck, this might even be the basis for a game. There is a deck of cards with professions (architect, banker, doctor, actor, etc.), and another deck with subject matters, and your goal is to try an come up with some tenuous reasons for why that profession needs to know about that subject. Maybe there is a timer, and there are two "professionals", and the other players judge which one had the most credible idea?
[+] [-] Cshelton|10 years ago|reply
I live in an area where many expensive, luxury apartments have been built in the last few years and every single one of them have complaints from "hearing the person above me set the toilet seat down" for example.
I now base what apartment I live in by the thickness and sound isolation of the walls and ceilings/floors.
I lived in a complex built in the 80's. It's dead silent. I can jump up and down on my floor and the neighbor below me will never hear. Now in a newer complex, I can't walk across my hardwood floored kitchen without knowing my neighbor will hear every footstep. I have to take the people above me a bottle of wine and ask them kindly to try and not make as much noise as it sounds like they are moving furniture ALL THE TIME. Even though it's not their fault...and they really aren't moving furniture every evening...They are just walking around...
Architects, engineers, whoever...please, please, please, stop skimping out on noise insulation in new construction. You are creating a whole generation of buildings that are awful to live in. My next apartment, I have no idea what I'm going to do...the tour ends right away for me when I hear thumps from above the second I walk into the room.
I seriously shouldn't and don't want to know every time the couple next to me has sex or the guys on the other side of me are watching a loud action movie.
I would pay so much more in rent per month for a place that had more sound insulation. Take note building developers. I WILL PAY MORE.
[+] [-] robmiller|10 years ago|reply
(1) Is the floor construction concrete and steel or a wood joist system. The concrete/steel building type is preferred. A caveat is if it is a "loft" style with no ceiling (drywall, etc) and is open to the concrete structure for reasons I'll describe at the end.
(2) Ask if the apartment building was designed to convert to condos at some point. If the potential conversion was known during design, an acoustics professional may have been involved.
(3) Is the space marketed as "luxury?" While dangerous to trust marketing this much, if legitimately so, should have "above norm" acoustical separation between spaces.
(4) Pull a wall plate off a switch that's in a demising wall between units and look for fiberglass in the wall cavity around the edges of the backbox. You may be able to knock on walls and tell if they're hollow or fiberglass filled. If you find two layers of drywall between the plate and backbox, that's a good sign.
(5) Often the bathroom/toilet plumbing is along the corridor wall in newer buildings. Can you hear the water running from the corridor? If so, you can expect to hear the neighbors' plumbing above your unit too. Listen for water hissing in the walls while you run the kitchen sink.
Yes there's noise through walls from adjacent neighbors, but be aware of impact noises above. If floors are hard (not carpet) expect to hear footfall noise unless a resilient underlayment was properly installed in the units and/or the ceiling is isolated in the unit below. If the unit has hardwood floors, check for a gap between the baseboard trim and the floor by running a business card between. If it doesn't fit, then the resilient floor is compromised and your neighbors below are likely to hear your footfalls, and chances are you will hear your neighbors' above too.
[1] https://www.quora.com/When-renting-an-apartment-how-can-I-te...
[+] [-] cmarschner|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Anechoic|10 years ago|reply
There are three potential problems that we frequently come across:
1. Many building developers just don't care, so long as the structure meets minimum code (which is typically based on the International Building Code model standard of STC 50)
2. Many building developers (and architects) may care, but don't have the knowledge to pull it off. They may even design sound insulation measures based on existing designs, but may not be aware that a particular detail difference between the reference design and their design may render the the sound insulation moot.
3. The developers and/or architects may care and may have the knowledge to properly design the structure, but the contractors either don't care or don't have the knowledge to construct the building properly leading to short-circuits or substitutions the render the sound insulation design useless.
[+] [-] bkjelden|10 years ago|reply
Unit C living space
Unit C bedrooms
Unit B living space
Unit B bedrooms
Unit A living space
Unit A bedrooms
This means that the space directly above one's bedrooms - their very own living space - was less likely to be occupied while they were sleeping. Seemed like a very ingenious design to me.
My life has taken me to live in SFHs now, so I don't really look at a lot of apartment buildings anymore, but I've never seen another building with this design.
[+] [-] pasbesoin|10 years ago|reply
I'm single. I ended up in a house solely because every shared living space tried had serious noise issues.
I don't need all this room -- nor the maintenance. But I am most reluctant to share walls, ceiling, even a floor with someone else, ever again. Even if it's quiet, moving in, who knows what you're going to get next month, year?
Urban planners want us to live more densely and "efficiently." My primary response: Fix the noise problems. Then we can talk.
[+] [-] billforsternz|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elchief|10 years ago|reply
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/13/realestate/soundproofing-f...
[+] [-] Overtonwindow|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] csomar|10 years ago|reply
I wonder where you live. I live in a under-developed nation with bad real-estate and there is a good number of building with special noise isolation. Granted, they are double the price. Not only because of noise isolation, they come with other perks (security, pool, quality of materials...).
If you are living in a 2million+ city, my guess this kind of estate already exists. Maybe you should search better.
[+] [-] brenschluss|10 years ago|reply
Noise isolation is expensive. Owners and developers rarely want to pay for it. The problem is rarely the architect/engineer, the problem is that it's an expensive up-front design+construction cost, and also difficult to achieve after construction.
[+] [-] Spooky23|10 years ago|reply
The only quiet low/mid rise buildings built now are the precast concrete building (think Hampton inn). They only get built that way because of the building codes.
[+] [-] hackbinary|10 years ago|reply
>> I have to take the people above me a bottle of wine and ask them kindly to try and not make as much noise ...
I just live on the top floor.
[+] [-] vanderZwan|10 years ago|reply
The problem is that it rarely is a direct cause, except in rare crime passionnel situations. However, there's a measurable indirect effect when you add up the extra irritation, lack of sleep, etc. which affects all inhabitants of an apartment block. The consequences are measurable when you look at the "average".
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] awjr|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Anechoic|10 years ago|reply
Yes, sound matters. Sound can help to characterize an environment. But I read some of the quotes in the article ("We need reverberation", "The beauty of the high ceilings and big windows was amplified, and humanized, by the scratching of chairs and the clomp-clomp of boots on hardwood floors", "There can be privacy in a crowd" etc) and I hope that architects don't come away with the message "background noise is good, silence is bad" because that's not the case.
Look at the Grand Central terminal example - yes, the high ceilings and reverberant background helps to create an atmosphere of a "great metropolis." But it also hurts the intelligibility of conversations and the PA system. You're trading acoustic comfort for atmosphere. The non-native English speaker or hearing-impared patron is not going to appreciate the atmosphere when they miss their train because they couldn't understand the PA announcement that departure platform has changed.
Similarly, yes a room sounds very different when a window is open. Sometimes you need that background noise. I remember being in a bedroom that was so quiet I could hear the blood flowing through my ears. I had to open a window to let in the natural sound to I didn't go crazy. On the other hand, you may not want that sound of sirens coming in at 3am when you, or your newborn, is trying to get some sleep.
I guess my recommendation hasn't changed - hire an acoustician! :)
[+] [-] jholman|10 years ago|reply
I'm not looking for the acoustic atmosphere of a place to reassure me that that place is high-status. I think that the author of TFA does have that need.
[+] [-] samstave|10 years ago|reply
But yet - that is the reason why we have sound engineering and Acousticians.
Architects already know sound matters, this is just a puff piece by some who think they have discovered something that is already and actual trade.
Regardless, the execution of the smarmy article's hover for sounds, click to compare, was quite well done.
[+] [-] tracker1|10 years ago|reply
The harder part, is that rough surfaces that tend to mute the "loud" tend to collect a lot more dust and be harder to clean properly/regularly at scale, which is another concern for some spaces.
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|10 years ago|reply
Does Grand Central have a non-emergency public-address system? Cannot recall having ever heard it.
[+] [-] ianamartin|10 years ago|reply
I moved from a Dallas, TX suburb to a pretty "nice" place in Brooklyn, NY last June.
Holy shit, the things that people think of as normal and okay here are totally nuts.
I never heard a damn sound from anything in Dallas. Nothing. I could play my classical music pretty much as loud as I wanted whenever I wanted, and neighbors would never hear it.
Here in Brooklyn, I swear to god we live like animals, and people are okay with it.
I got a noise complaint with cops and everything the other day just having reasonably quiet sex with my girlfriend. Neither of us is noisy.
I can hear everything above and below and next to me. It's stupid. There's no central heat/ac. The building just turns on the heat when they feel like it, which is nuts. It's more than 80 degrees in my apt right now. I don't even like that temp ever. I have to open windows to let it cold air to bring the temp down to something reasonable.
There are no reasonable grocery store. If you want to cook a reasonable meal at home with your own cooking skills, you have to go to at least 5 different places, and there's nothing about a store that tells you what you can and can't get there. It's insane. And they don't tell you with a sign on the the door if they are or are not cash only.
I love the opportunities I've found in NYC, and am truly loving my job, but the tradeoffs are fucking terrible. Aside from public transportation, this is the worst, most idiotic city in the world.
Seriously, it's like living as an animal here.
And I live in one of the best parts of Brooklyn. This is just stupid, and I kind of hate it.
[+] [-] m52go|10 years ago|reply
No sidebars, suggestions, social buttons or anything...just quality content presented cleanly with just enough branding and functionality. The moving images with the sound was an excellent touch, and although it's specific to the purpose of this article, I love the idea of looping moving images that aren't obnoxious and add to the content.
I don't read the NYT very much, so I apologize if this is something that's been around for a while.
EDIT: I had loaded the site with Ad Block turned on...so I didn't see the social buttons. Frankly even those are done very elegantly, and if I were a user of those social networks, perhaps I'd even appreciate them.
[+] [-] TheAceOfHearts|10 years ago|reply
If I don't have a baby, I don't want to be woken up in the middle of the night by crying babies. If I don't have any children, I don't want to hear them yelling all day long.
[+] [-] copperx|10 years ago|reply
I did this because as a teenager I always struggled with privacy in my parent's house. Even though the house wasn't small, it was hard to have a conversation with my girlfriend without it being heard in the nearby rooms (my parents rarely watched TV, so there was no sound to mask my voice).
If I ever get the chance to build another house, I will specify rockwool insulation in all inner walls and all-around solid doors. In that way, I can have a small house with great privacy. Or I can study while someone else is watching a movie with surround sound in the adjacent room with no problem.
[+] [-] xenophonf|10 years ago|reply
If you had a baby, you wouldn't want them woken up in the middle of their nap by someone coming home and turning on a TV, closing a door, or something else equally normal. If you had children, you'd want them to have a quiet place to study and rest, even when the twenty-something neighbors are throwing a raucous party.
I think most people, including parents, both don't want to be disturbed and don't want to disturb others.
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|10 years ago|reply
"The engineer tested the penthouse to find the problematic noise frequencies, then used accelerometers to measure the shaking. She determined which noises were airborne and which were from vibration. With that information she was able to specify materials and construction methods that would hush the rattle and hum.
Throughout the 3,500-square-foot apartment, pipes and ducts were wrapped in acoustic barrier insulation, walls and ceilings were hung on vibration-absorbing rails and floating floors were installed, at a total cost of about $200,000.
...
The solution is seldom as simple as adding insulation. Noise is insidious. No two room hums are exactly alike, and what silences one might make another worse. 'What a contractor did across town that worked 99 percent of the time might not work for you,' said Alan Fierstein, an acoustical consultant who owns a 39-year-old New York firm called Acoustilog."
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/13/realestate/soundproofing-f...
[+] [-] Htsthbjig|10 years ago|reply
After having lived in those cities I enjoy a lot living in places like Switzerland or Spain where there is silence or people in a much more natural way, like small buildings with pedestrian only streets.
All this background noises in big cities are just cars thermal engine vibration. I hate it. You go to savanna and you see 6 ton elephants that sound very weak because nature is efficient.
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] erentz|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chiph|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] at-fates-hands|10 years ago|reply
I just moved into a classic MCM house which has a ton of built-ins (I should post some pictures when I get a chance) and although the house has really high, angled ceilings and a very open concept floor plan, it's surprisingly quiet.
[+] [-] jwatte|10 years ago|reply
But that doesn't change exterior noise transmission.
[+] [-] triggercut|10 years ago|reply
When I was studying Architecture I did a group research project around this very idea, but limited it to public space in cities (particularly the one I was in at the time).
We took many recordings in Parks, Retail heavy streets, Business centers (on the weekend), tourist areas etc... We asked people to listen to the recordings and rate things like "Does this space feel Cold or Warm"? As well as asking them to draw a diagram of what they imagined (which is a whole other area of interesting research that I can't remember the name of off the top of my head).
Going through the literature, and more scientific studies, the short history is it's thought we evolved to associate loud, bass sounds, (which are less directional and imply larger masses) with danger (eg, thunder, large earth movements), which can lead to an increased amount of cortisol expression in children. It's less pronounced in adults suggesting that we get used to it when we realise it's not a real threat (CBT).
One paper looked at school children near Heathrow Airport vs. in a similar urban area with no air-traffic. The former had much higher cortisol levels generally and performed worse academically after adjusting for other environmental factors. Another looked at offices and the effect of HVAC systems droning away 9-5 (ever noticed when the HVAC goes off at work?)
What we found in our limited study was what you would expect; Places with live background music rated much more favorably. The stand out was Circular Quay (this was Sydney), where there were a lot of buskers and performers interspersed with happy sounding chatter from passes by.
Outdoor areas that reverberate (Martin Place on the weekend with skateboarders) as you can imagine didn't rate too well.
Not really groundbreaking by any means, but designing space means designing for everything we experience; light, sound, tactility, temporality.
p.s One of the problems with traditional Architectural education is that it's hard to convey sound design through a visual-centric presentation style, so not many bother. Movement, whether implied or explicit, was always important to me in my designs and relatively easy to visually communicate (animation etc). If I ever go back to finish and become a real Architect, sound will probably be just as important, luckily VR is now at a stage with entry price and skill level where faithfully constructing the sonic profile of a space should be possible and easily communicable.
[+] [-] turaw|10 years ago|reply
[1]: http://www.etymotic.com/consumer/earphones.html
[+] [-] thrownaway2424|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] newman314|10 years ago|reply
I travel frequently and I pretty much have my Etymotics with me at all times.
[+] [-] jwatte|10 years ago|reply
And when public services in the US (NY subway, say) buy from the cheapest bidder, guess what's been compromised to lower cost?
The US is a hundred years behind the state of the art in sound management, just like most other public goods.
[+] [-] ladon86|10 years ago|reply
The level of amplification that space created was really quite impressive!
[+] [-] dman|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mmmBacon|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skyhatch1|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jdc0589|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TrevorJ|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GregBuchholz|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sandworm101|10 years ago|reply
I just finished a three-hour lecture on that one. Didn't see any architects.
[+] [-] influx|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thrownaway2424|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cballard|10 years ago|reply
- You're playing music? Huh?
- You have a dog in the office? What? Yip yip yip yip.
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
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