Learning Room Acoustics by Design : A Project-Based Experience

Abstract

Optimizing room acoustics teaching for architects and building engineers is an unfinished business. Moreover, theoreticalexplanations about acoustic concepts hardly support the understanding of basic concepts of acoustics on these students. Abasic BLA (Bipolar Laddering Assessment) experiment is presented with students showing that an active learning methodcan be accepted by them more easily when ‘‘sonification’’ is included in the course. This process, which converts data intonon-speech audio to make acoustic concepts audible, is suggested as a possible solution for this problem. Additionally, theexperiment indicates the basic guidelines for the improvement of a project-based pedagogy, which pretends to broadenarchitecture student’s insight into acoustic problems.