An indoor environment that has long reverberation is often perceived by our ears as being noisy and irritating. Dampening reverberation and making it shorter is a good way of creating a more pleasant soundscape in all sorts of rooms.
There is a certain degree of reverberation in every room. This means that sound is reflected and ends up hanging around in the room. You can test whether a room has long or short reverberation by clapping your hands together normally. The sooner you hear the sound, the shorter the reverberation in the room. Short reverberation means that the “sound play” is quicker, making it nicer to spend more time in this sort of environment.
The space in a room isn’t normally big enough for echos to occur. You normally need one tenth of a second between the sound being made and it bouncing off a surface for it to be perceived as an echo. In terms of distance, this means between 15 and 20 metres. A so-called flutter echo can occur with a shorter distance between the reflecting surfaces, especially if one of these surfaces is ridged. You might have experienced this phenomenon in a church or an old farm building in the countryside.
The knowledge of how sound moves about in a room is very important for us at Svensson. It’s well known that reverberation decreases with sound-absorbing textiles. In a well furnished room, our brains don’t need to waste energy processing irritating sounds that have no informational value. This gives us a greater capacity for remembering, solving problems, and managing useful information. In other words, good acoustics in the workplace are a good investment - in terms of both health and business.
We draw on well-established knowledge and a solid base of experience when producing our noise-rated textiles. To learn more about the basics of how sound is created, we recommend taking a closer look on our website.
Basic training in sound
A few moments of reading matter about what sound is, how it occurs and how it behaves. For example, why do we hear the bass from the meeting room next door but not the voices?
Environments for wellbeing
Textiles designer, Pernilla McGillivray, and informatics researcher, Martin Ljungdahl Eriksson, talk textiles and wellbeing.
Intark improves acoustics
At Solregn there was a desire to add some colour to the office environment and reduce noise. Hanging textiles from Svensson’s Grain collection were part of the solution.