Acoustics and the “Palau de la Música” building

Definition We know acoustics as the science that studies sound and all the mechanical waves. The most important thing that acoustics studies are the audible sounds. Acoustics is useful in a lot of fields of knowledge like art, technology, medicine and much more.

History Pythagoras was the first man who studied acoustics, although it is also known that the Chinese were using a musical scale based on the overtones on a string. The modern acoustics were born in 1985, by the American physicist W.C. Sabine. He found a mathematical formula that hadn’t been improved until someone took into account factors such as humidity or temperature.

Architectural acoustics There are usually three kind of things that we want to do with the sound in a specific building or room: 1.To absorb it 2.To block it 3.To cover it up

To absorb We usually use soft surfaces and materials that are able to absorb the sound, like the “bee-hive structure”, particularly in big and wide buildings in order to reduce the reverberation.

Absorption panel

To block it Blocking panels are usually made of different layers of rigid material. Sometimes it can be a multi-layer wood.

To cover it up The most used form for covering a sound is to mask it. It’s based on adding an artificial sound to the one that we want to “hide”. This is very common in workplaces to make employees more productive by making them less distracted. The masking sound must be hardly noticeable, with a lower volume and a very uniform tone.

Analysis by the Sabine formula Where alpha is the absorption rate, T is the reverberation time, A is the absorption area, S is the complete surface and V is the room volume in.

The most important fact about the building is that the reverberation time is higher than it would be in a simple building (made to play music in them). This is due to the high amount of surface covered with glass and the big dimensions of the building itself.