Acoustical criteria and design approaches for music education and rehearsal spaces

Abstract

Case studies of three music education spaces will present acoustical measurement data with architectural features of the rooms compared to criteria from Sabine (1964), Pirn (1978), Gade (1988), Wenger (2008), and Tsaih (2011) among others to assess the sound qualities of the spaces. Among other qualities, reverberation time, room volume, hearing each other, and speech intelligibility are evaluated. Data are also compered to the Norwegian Standard NS 8178-2014. The case studies show how these criteria can be achieved given very different architectural systems employed in the rooms and describe the limits of where the qualities cannot be achieved due to the limits of program, budget, site, or space. Efforts are made to make each surface in the rooms acoustically productive in an optimized design to the extent practicable.