Building and Room Acoustics 2024

Morning Lectures
- Room modes; Schroeder cut-off frequency; Diffuse sound field; Sound decay and reverberation time
- Energy balance and Sabine’s equation; Total energy density; Sound pressure level in a room
- Reverberation distance; Geometrical acoustics (image sources) and impulse response
- Sound waves in unbounded solids , focusing on the characteristics of longitudinal and transverse waves.
- Waves in plates and bars, including sound radiation by a plate.
- Sound transmission loss and radiation efficiency
- Single-number quantities.

Afternoon Tutorial
- Measuring and calculation of room modes or measuring reverberation time with interrupted noise method

Morning lectures
- Physical phenomena and related prediction models for direct sound transmission through walls and floors (analytical approaches and numerical techniques), including
o Airborne sound transmission through single walls;
o Impact sound and improvement of impact sound insulation;
o Double walls and the related resonance phenomena and structural transmission through sound bridges.
- Accuracy of sound insulation measurements and predictions.
- Apparent airborne and impact sound transmission in buildings including the phanomena of flanking sound transmission.
- Simple calculation model: statistical energy analysis (SEA) based EN 12354 framework
- Advanced methods with examples and solutions for lightweight and mass timber buildings.
- A special focus will be also set on the annoyance by low frequency impact sound, as well as practical and innovative solutions for its mitigation.

Afternoon tutorial
- Practical prediction problems which are to be solved with the analytical models covered in the corresponding lecture.
- Prediction of the apparent sound transmission between two rooms using the EN 12354 framework. The contributions of the different transmission paths will be examined and solutions to meet design goals will be proposed. Difficulties with the availabilty and further methods for obtaining of necessary input data will be discussed.

Morning lectures
- Broad overview on several classes of acoustic materials (e.g. porous and poro-elastic layers, micro-perforated panels, acoustic resonators)
- Explanation of underlying physical principles of acoustic materials and typical applications.
- Also vibro-acoustic metamaterials, a hot topic in research, will also be covered.
- Problem of acoustic absorption by reciprocal treatments.
- The concept of critical coupling will be introduced and applied to a reflection problem involving a rigidly-backed acoustic treatment.
- The concept will be extended to symmetric and asymmetric acoustic systems in transmission problems.

Afternoon tutorial
- The working principle of locally resonant metamaterials, dispersion curves and stopbands will be illustrated via a matlab tutorial
- The concept of perfect absorption will be illustrated using Matlab scripts which will be shared with the trainees.

Morning lectures
- Introduction to acoustical holography and sound field reconstruction (theory); Applications to room acoustic analysis and a few relevant examples
- Overview room acoustic measurements (ISO3382); Uncertainties in room acoustic measurements; GUM Framework; Spatial fluctuations of the sound field

Afternoon tutorial
- Creating a measurement tool in Matlab from scratch, orusing the ITA-Toolbox for Matlab to conduct measurements and analyze impulse responses.
- Identify SNR-influences and determine the quality of the measurements.

Morning lectures
- Wave-theoretical methods and applications + examples
- Geometrical acoustics with applications + examples

Afternoon tutorial
- Calculations (equations around uncertainties, memory consumption and computation time) and hands-on with software tools