Sound Insulation

Sound has its place in our lives. Can you imagine a quiet police or fire siren? Going to a concert and having to be quiet to hear the music? How about being able to hear crickets when a walk off home run is hit during a postseason baseball game? No! Sound & noise aren’t always unwelcome in our lives… More

We want to make it easy for you to become a sound pressure mathematical genius. Below you find sound pressure math explained in an easy-to-learn fashion that will make you an authority on sound pressure math. Imagine if someone had laid out tensor calculus for Einstein this way. He may have finished his theory of relativity years earlier. Now let us dive into the wonderful world of pascals, decibels, and other units and see how they relate to sound… More

Wallace Clement Sabine, born in 1868, is considered the father of architectural acoustics. He attended Ohio State University where he physics. He later went to Harvard to pursue his graduate studies. After graduating, he joined Harvard as a faculty member teaching physics. When it came to the study of sound, Sabine never had any formal training. He became fascinated with how sound differed from one lecture hall to another. Along with his assistants, he began moving materials to different lecture halls to see what materials made the lecture halls sound better. Sabine and his assistants spent many nights moving materials and measuring sound waves; he and his team used an organ and a stop watch to measure the deterioration of sound as it passed through the lecture hall… More

In order to determine the speed of sound in a particular medium, we need to know the medium’s elastic properties and its density. A medium’s elastic properties determine whether or not the medium will deform or lose its shape due to external forces. Sound travels faster in mediums with high elasticity and minimal deformity – like steel. Sound travels more slowly in less rigid mediums that deform easily – like rubber. Sound travels more slowly in mediums with greater density… More

In 1842 Christian Doppler hypothesized that sound frequencies change, relative to the observer, when emitted from a moving sound source. In 1845 Buys Ballot proved Doppler’s Hypothesis correct. As the ambulance approaches, the waves seem shorter and the frequency seems higher than when it moves away from you. When it’s moving away, the waves seem longer and the frequency seems lower… More

George Washington University had a problem. The compressors on a large chiller unit near a residential area were extremely loud. They needed to find a solution to their noise problem to address complaints from neighbors in that residential area. After installing sound insulation developed by Thermaxx Jackets LLC, the noise was immediately reduced, providing a quick and affordable solution…More

Sound reduction, also known as sound absorption or sound attenuation, is the act of reducing the general noise pollution in industrial, public and commercial areas. Excess noise can alter the experience and efficiency within an already noisy facility; therefore there are many benefits to reducing noise pollution on the industrial level…More

Close your eyes for a moment and pretend you are picnicking, during the mid-afternoon, with family and friends in Central Park. About a two football fields away you can see a softball game. You can see the men and women cheering as ballplayers smack the ball and race around the bases. You see a player slide into home plate and you watch the umpire signal him out. You can see all this action, but you cannot hear it. Later that night as the temperature cools and other softball teams are playing under the lights you can see and hear everything clearly. Why is this so? More

Automotive muffler designers use sound physics to reduce the amount of noise coming from automobile exhaust systems. The designers use sound wave interference to cancel out noise. In this article we will explore the concept of sound wave interference and see how muffler designers put to it to work… More

What is a sound wave? Not being able to see a sound wave makes this a difficult question. Close your eyes and picture dropping a hammer onto a table. As the hammer hits the table, you hear a loud noise. What happened? The hammer hitting the table created a disturbance in the medium causing a wave to propagate through the medium. What does that exactly mean? Here we are dealing with two independent events: first, the hammer hitting the table causing a disturbance; second, the wave propagating or moving away from the disturbance… More