Ecophon Acoustic Bulletin

The Acoustics'08 Conference is now finished!

On behalf of all editors of Acoustic Bulletin we would like to thank all readers, the conference organisers, all those we have met at the Ecophon stand and especially those who we have had interviews with. We trust that your inputs will be of great value to many and we look forward to keep in touch. See you, and we hope you all have a great summer !!

Markku, Paulli, Tobias, Katja, Rainer, Jonas, Katrin, Martin, Per, Tina, Pierre, Colin, Anthony, Mikolaj, Guus, Mariëlle, Carsten, Erling and Marc

By Marc Janssen at 2:52 PM | Permalink

This is an interview with PhD Valtteri Hongisto, Senior Research Scientist at the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health and Adjunct Professor at Helsinki University of Technology.
He has performed a lot of acoustic research and has been involved in the creation of standards and guidelines, for example the Acoustic Classification of Spaces in buildings SFS 5907. Also he is one of the writers of the coming Finnish Classification on indoor climate.

Valtteri mentioned that the ISO standard 3382-3 will only deal with open-plan office acoustics and not with open plans in general, like in schools, libraries or hospitals. The focus will be on spacial attenuation and speech intelligibility. By doing that we can judge the performance at any distance from the speaker.

Listen to the interview (3,47 minutes).

By Pauli Pallaskorpi, Concept Developer - Education and Markku Hirvonen, Concept Developer - Healthcare, Ecophon Finland.

By Marc Janssen at 11:43 PM | Permalink

The use of alarms in hospitals was discussed intensively during the two days session "Healthcare Acoustics & Speech Privacy".

A study presented by S. Okcu, College of Architecture, GaTech, states that a patient in an ICU can be surrounded by up to 33 different alarms from medical equipment. Not only are the alarms disturbing to the patients, they also make the task for the staff to detect and analyse them more demanding.

Ilene Bush-Vishniac
"The alarms are of utmost importance, but do we really need all these alarms?" This is a question asked by Dr. Busch-Vishniac, MacMaster University (formerly from Johns Hopkins University) who was one of the presenters at the conference. And the question is relevant; in nine out of ten times no action is taken when an alarm goes off, except for turning the alarm off.

Continue reading "Alarms in hospitals – a chaotic sound environment" »

By Katrin Bergmark at 1:09 PM | Permalink

Interview with John Hinton OBE
President of the Institute of Acoustics

Regarding Euronoise 2009, Edinburgh, Scotland 26-28 October 2009.
www.euronoise2009.org.uk
Email:euronoise2009@ioa.org.uk

By Colin Campbell, Concept Developer - Education, Ecophon UK and Ireland

By Marc Janssen at 9:03 PM | Permalink

By Marc Janssen at 8:59 PM | Permalink

Noise levels in hospitals are typically more than 15 dB(A) higher than target values given in guidelines (for example target values from WHO and the US Environmental Protection Agency). Furthermore, noise is often one of the top complaints from staff and patients. This is concluded in a review made by Hui Xie and Jian Kang at the University of Sheffield.

Continue reading "Influence of noise on patient’s sleep" »

By Marc Janssen at 8:25 PM | Permalink

Mr Fausto E. Rodriguez Manzo presented a paper about "sonic" character of architecture.

The author stated, that hearing should be understood almost equally to sight, as a sense used to perceive architecture.

Mr.Fausto E. Rodriguez Manzo
Metropolitan University in Mexico City.
E-mail:rfme@correo.azc.uam.mx

By Mikołaj Jarosz, Concept Developer - Education, Ecophon Poland.
E-mail:mikolaj.jarosz@saint-gobain.com

By Marc Janssen at 8:15 PM | Permalink

Directly after the session on healthcare and acoustics this afternoon we had a little talk with Dr Michael Phiri, one of the presenters.

Dr.Michael Phiri is Senior Research Fellow in the School of Architecture at the University of Sheffield.

By Marc Janssen, Concept Developer - Healthcare, Ecophon.

By Marc Janssen at 8:28 PM | Permalink

On Tuesday Adrian Popplewell of Arup Acoustics presented a paper entitled "The Future of UK Hospital Design", and here he summarises for Acoustic Bulletin his involvement in the early drafting of HTM 08.01, the new Acoustic Guidance document for Healthcare. He also talks about the Drivers for Change in Healthcare over the coming years.

By Anthony Thomas, Concept Developer - Healthcare, Ecophon UK and Ireland.

Listen to the interview (2,27 minutes).

If you have questions or comments, please contact Anthony Thomas.

E-mail:anthony.thomas@ecophon.co.uk

By Marc Janssen at 3:16 PM | Permalink

Dr.Michael Phiri is Senior Research Fellow in the School of Architecture at the University of Sheffield.

He talks to Acoustic Bulletin about his presentation this afternoon entitled "Eliminating Environmental Stressors: managing hospital noise by design".

He is an advocate of the use of Evidence-Based Design to improve patient outcomes and reduce hospital operating costs.

For info, email:m.phiri@sheffield.ac.uk

By Anthony Thomas, Concept Developer - Healthcare, Ecophon UK and Ireland.

By Marc Janssen at 2:49 PM | Permalink

Open office acoustics is today probably one of the most active architectural acoustics areas in terms of standardization.
Several standards, both national and international provide us with a powerful set of descriptors.

Interview (1,47 minutes) with Pierre Chigot, Concept Developer - Offices, Ecophon France.

By Tina Frisbæk Jensen, Concept Developer - Offices, Ecophon Denmark.

By Marc Janssen at 9:38 AM | Permalink

I am Tobias Angelbeck, Concept Developer for Acoustics in Health Care Premises, Ecophon Germany. I talked to Dr. Jo Solet – the clinical Instructor at the Harvard Medical School, Department of Psychiatry, Cambridge, MA (USA).

Right now she and her department are doing two researches.
One is a behavioural research project related to patients exposure to noise, with an outcome on measure of medical views.
The other is a virtual hospital in a neuroscience lab, studying how patients respond to specific real stimuli in a hospital environment.

Continue reading "Every decibel counts!" »

By Marc Janssen at 3:50 PM | Permalink

Interview (3,35 minutes)

By Marc Janssen / Concept Developer - Healthcare, Ecophon.

By Marc Janssen at 3:19 PM | Permalink

Tor Halmrast

Mr Tor Halmrast from Norway had a very interesting lecture about how to measure reverberation time, and how important it is to be a good “cougher”.

Tor works with music and acoustics. When he is on holiday, he often finds interesting rooms what he wants to measure. To measure room acoustic parameters today requires a lot of equipment that you seldom bring with you. That is why Mr Halmrast bought a small Wav-recorder and some balloons.

Continue reading "Simplified room acoustic measurement" »

By Marc Janssen at 3:19 PM | Permalink

It's 30 degrees and sunny so we choose to walk instead of taking the metro as we've been indoors allday. We wait to cross the traffic - it's noisy with horns beeping, busy with mopeds screeching by and hot but there is much to enjoy. Cutting through the backstreets we see some lovely buildings, markets and wary of crossing the busy roads even on a green man.

It's become quieter and we are conscious that Paris families are home eating while we walk past the open windows. Closer to the hotel children are out playing and enjoying a splash in the nearby fountains.It's a comfort to be living in a quieter area........

By Colin Campbell, Concept Developer - Education, Ecophon UK and Ireland.

By Marc Janssen at 2:47 PM | Permalink