About acoustics

If you are looking for a quick answer, here it is: the highest permissible noise intensity is a value related to an 8-hour workday, which in Poland (according to European Union guidelines) is 85 dB. Any violation of this limit places an obligation on the employer to take immediate technical and organizational actions.

The role of the architect in the modern world has long transcended aesthetics and functionality. Today, every project is a complex ecosystem in which you must juggle the client's priorities, rigorous standards, a tight budget, and increasing pressure for environmental responsibility. Every material chosen is a statement – not only of style but also of values. The challenge is to find products that are more than the sum of their parts: they must be beautiful, technically efficient, and authentically sustainable.

The choice of acoustic material defines the character of the interior. When you face the dilemma of natural aesthetics of wood wool versus the modern flexibility of PET felt, you seek a solution that uncompromisingly combines design with rigorous technical standards. This guide will provide you with concrete answers and help you make the optimal decision for your project.

Noise and poor acoustics at home are among the biggest, albeit often invisible, enemies of effective learning. Before you buy new notebooks and a backpack, take care of the most important thing – a quiet and conducive environment for doing homework. Scientific research clearly shows that children are significantly more sensitive to noise than adults, and sounds like the hum of a dishwasher, background conversations, or echoes in a room can dramatically lower their ability to concentrate and understand text.

Noise in Polish schools exceeds permissible levels by even double, creating an environment that seriously harms the educational process and the health of students and teachers. Research by the National Institute of Hygiene and the Central Institute for Labor Protection shows that the average sound level in classrooms during lessons reaches 72 dB, while the legal limit (PN-B-02151-2:2018-01) sets the boundary at 35 dB.

The playground in the heart of the neighborhood is a common source of neighborly conflicts, pitting the need for children to play freely against residents' right to peace. The main issue is the noise accompanying the play – screams, squeals, and the thudding of balls, which becomes unbearable for many people when close to their windows.

Why is the sound of an alarm siren high and shrill, while the rumble of a distant storm is low and deep? What distinguishes the sound of a double bass from that of a piccolo? The answer to these questions lies in one of the most fundamental properties of a sound wave – its frequency.

Each of us intuitively understands what volume is. A whisper is quiet, while a starting jet is deafeningly loud. But what really gives sound its physical power? What moves the diaphragm of a microphone or our eardrum? The answer is a fundamental quantity in the world of acoustics: sound pressure.

You bought great audio equipment, set up the speakers according to all the rules, turned on your favorite song, and... felt disappointed. The sound is booming, lacking details, and the bass seems to have a life of its own. Where lies the problem when the equipment is top-notch?

You have invested in acoustic panels, but you still feel that the acoustics of your room could be better? Before you reach for thicker and more expensive materials, learn the secret that lies just behind your treatment. We are talking about the air gap – a deliberately left space between the panel and the wall. This is one of the simplest and most effective ways to radically improve sound absorption effectiveness, especially at problematic lower frequencies.

Imagine an office where phones are ringing, coworkers are chatting at adjacent desks, and you are trying to focus on an important report. Sounds familiar? Employees are increasingly complaining about noise in open-plan offices – they feel distracted and fatigued, and crucial meetings can be interrupted by the noise from outside.

Have you ever listened to music very quietly and felt that the bass disappeared? Or wondered why alarms and sirens have such an irritating, shrill tone? The answer lies not only in the physics of sound waves but primarily in how our brain interprets this wave.

A constant sound level over time that produces the same energy effects (has the same square of acoustic pressure) as a time-varying measured signal.

How many songs have you listened to today? How many conversations have you had? And have you ever wondered how it happens that we hear? How does what someone says reach us? To answer this, we should start with what sound is.

Have you ever walked into an empty, minimally decorated room, clapped your hands, and heard a strange, metallic sound reminiscent of a quick "zzzing"? This unpleasant feeling, often compared to the fluttering of wings, is one of the most common and yet most irritating acoustic phenomena.

Impulse noise is the most dangerous type of noise for human hearing. It is a specific form of non-stationary noise, consisting of individual sound events or sequences of them, with a duration of less than 1 second. This type of noise is also characterized by a strictly defined maximum sound level, exceeding the value of its equivalent A-weighted sound level by more than 10 decibels.

The problem of having noisy neighbors can be extremely bothersome and annoying, and in extreme cases, it can even lead to changing residences. Living in an apartment, we most often complain about loud music, sounds coming from the television, loud conversations from neighbors, crying children, or the sounds of footsteps, usually from the apartment above us. How can we fight this? What should we pay attention to? Are noisy neighbors really always to blame?

This is a law formulated by Ernst Heinrich Weber. It is used to express the relationship between the physical measure of a stimulus and the sensory response (e.g., vision or hearing). It is also known as the strength of sensation. This law arises from many practical observations and has numerous technical applications.

The attribute that allows distinguishing between sounds of the same pitch and volume but coming from different sound sources. Timbre depends on the sound spectrum, meaning the content of the harmonic frequencies, their quantity and intensity, as well as their synchronicity, the shape of the sound envelope, the shape, and the rise time of the sound.

Almost everyone has heard of a decibel at least once in their life, but what is it really? Let's try to explain it. A decibel is primarily a logarithmic and dimensionless unit. This simply means that it defines a measure of ratio magnitudes and requires some reference, as it is not an absolute scale unit in itself – like, for example, a meter. Everyone knows how long a meter is.

Many people have encountered the concept of reverberation in a room, but few realize how this phenomenon occurs, what causes it, and how to combat it.