Acoustics
How sound behaves in a particular environment has a huge effect on how
well people hear. Folks with normal hearing are better able than folks
with hearing loss to extract speech from a din of background noise, but
it's no easy task even for them. Fortunately people are becoming more
aware of the importance of acoustics and are starting to modify
environments to promote communications rather than discourage it!
September 2006 - Here's an interesting
article that claims that the way we've been setting up rooms to optimize
sound is all wrong, because we've been measuring room acoustics wrong!
July 2007 - A Quiet
Day at the Office: Acoustics for People who are Hard of Hearing
November 2007 - Dinner with a din
February 2008 - What to do about noisy restaurants
March 2008 - High-pitched "Mosquito" Shoos Teens
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
November 2007
Walk into a restaurant with a friend, spouse or
significant other. Sit down, order a drink and start up a conversation in
your normal voice. Can you hear them? Can they hear you? In many
restaurants, the answer is no. And it's becoming the norm as dinner
conversations drown in a sea of background bar chatter and surround-sound
music systems. But if you think the people around you are to blame, think
again. Instead, blame a few staples of contemporary restaurant design -
hardwood floors and wide-open dining rooms, the exposed-brick facades and
large bay windows. They're the reasons patrons may resort to lip-reading
to talk at restaurants, says Tom Thunder, a Palatine-based audiologist and
acoustic engineer. 'It's the nature of the surfaces,' Thunder says. 'If
they're flat, hard and dense, they'll reflect sound almost perfectly. It's
like what a mirror does for light.'
Full Story
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
February 2008
Restaurant diners -- when they can make themselves
heard above the blaring music from a chef's iPod playlist, the clatters
and shouts from an open kitchen, and the roar of the cocktail drinkers in
an adjacent lounge -- are talking about restaurant noise these days more
than the food. And the sound of that is finally reaching management ears.
To address higher than anticipated noise levels -- and diner complaints --
the new Los Angeles brasserie Comme Ça has put carpets under tables, and
Pizzeria Mozza has installed acoustic panels on its high walls. But don't
look for either popular restaurant to change its ethos, or radically alter
those noise levels.
Full Story
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
March 2008
The Mosquito has landed - and the city's teens and
20-somethings are about to get bitten. A pesky new security device aims
to clear out young troublemakers from their hangouts in apartment-building
lobbies and foyers by emitting an irritating high-frequency screech that
can only be heard by young ears. The message: Buzz off. The British-made
Mosquito, used in 3,500 locations in the UK, costs $1,400, weighs five
pounds and looks like an innocuous wall-mounted speaker. But its obnoxious
85-decibel drone ranges as far as 60 feet and registers as a constant
screech to most people between the ages of 13 and 25.
Full Story
