Sound and Vibration Experts

As spring moves into summer, the world starts to wake up. People spend more time outside talking and playing, and that pesky bird keeps waking you up at 4 am! With all this activity, you might find yourself thinking that everything seems so loud now. As you are probably aware, all this sound can be measured in units of decibels (dB), but did you know that the unit dB means multiple things? Read on to learn about how the decibel may not be as simple as you think.

Have you ever been so engrossed reading something that you didn’t hear someone talking to you? Or hard at work while listening to music and suddenly realize you weren’t really listening for the last few minutes? Although our ears may hear all of the things going on around us, sometimes our brains tune out distracting or irrelevant sounds to help us focus or keep us from becoming overwhelmed as a result of large quantities of sensory information. This phenomenon is known as selective auditory attention and is a topic that falls within the broader subject of psychoacoustics. Read on to learn more about how humans can tune out the world around them.

One of the more confusing aspects of acoustics to our clients is the difference between “laboratory” and “field” ratings when it comes to partition design. For example, the International Building Code (IBC) distinguishes between the two for assemblies around dwelling units in a multi-family building: why the distinction and what does that mean for the designer of the building? Read on to learn more about the difference between lab and field ratings.