When a famous French luxury brand decided to renovate their offices in Shanghai recently, they turned to ZENFEEL for help. Why? Because they knew that comfortable, highly functional offices need acoustic treatment. Meeting rooms need to have a sense of privacy and security, large areas shouldn’t feel echoey, speech at regular volumes should carry well, and there should be no interruption from noise made in adjacent rooms. ZENFEEL helped the brand with a full acoustic consultation, detailing exactly how they could use various materials and techniques to achieve these goals. In this article, we’re going to detail four of the key recommendations we made, why, and what products were used.
The Dual Task
Before talking about the four recommendations, it’s important to understand that in an acoustic treatment like that which ZENFEEL performed for the brand, there is really a dual task at hand. The first part is to achieve a purpose-specific level of reverberation in each given space. Reverberation is the degree to which sound persists in an environment after its initial occurrence. When a space is full of hard, flat surfaces, it is often easy for sound to bounce around, creating a sort of echoey feel to speech and other sounds. Allowing sound to persist in a room can make it feel noisy, such that even a click of a pen might interrupt a presentation. On the other hand, removing the chance for sound to bounce around at all can make a room feel uncomfortably quiet. As every space is different, varied materials used in specific ways can achieve a balance between these two extremes.
The second part is sound insulation – reducing the amount of noise that enters a space from the external environment. In an office environment, this could be through walls, through pipes or ducts, through gaps in window or door fittings, or through partitions. Here the task is to use appropriate materials when fitting these elements, and sometimes to use supplementary products to bolster the sound insulating-qualities of existing installations.
Recommendation one: Large groove cut panels in presentation room
Here, we can see the brand has an auditorium-style meeting room, purpose built for presentations. It is a large space, with glass windows that are among the most sound-reflective materials found in any office. The potential for high reverberation is huge.
What we recommended
The acoustic treatment here involved placing large Groove Polyester Acoustic Panels on the walls. Seamlessly blending in, in the pictures above they are visible as the brown vertically striped wall panels. These work to reduce reverberation by absorbing a high amount of sound, thanks to their unique texture and depth.
Why?
By reducing reverberation around the seating area of the room, the sound coming from the presentation area of the room will be more clearly heard, and less likely interrupted by the noise of shuffling seats or people typing on their laptops. The panels are also low-emission, meeting the WELL certification requirement for VOC emissions, meaning that they will not disturb air quality.
Recommendation two: Correctly install partitions
What we recommended
In the above picture we can see a partition between the amphitheater and another space. ZENFEEL gave advice on partitions in the office, regarding how they can be installed to increase sound insulation. By keeping fixtures well-sealed and incorporating acoustic control products, partitions can really effectively insulate one space from another not just visually, but aurally too.
Recommendation three: Wall panels in private meeting room
What we recommended
Here we can see a phone booth, used for taking calls. With the sound quality of phone calls often found lacking, it’s very important that people on both ends of the phone can send and receive a clear signal, and for them to be focused and uninterrupted. Here our acoustic treatment involved placing large Polyster Acoustic Panels that go from desk-height up to the ceiling.
Why
This is an extremely high degree of reverberation reduction, tailored for this specific use case. The size and coverage of the panels allow for an very quiet environment, one that might be inappropriate in the context of in-person meetings, but that can transform over-the-phone meetings for the better.
Recommendation four: Pin-board panels
What we recommended
In rooms where wall-space is limited, it’s often the task of those performing acoustic treatments to find novel ways to integrate acoustic control products. In the case above, ZENFEEL’s acoustic panels were used as pin-boards next to the whiteboards in meeting rooms.
Why
Together with the ceiling baffles that can be seen suspended in the first picture above, the layout of the boards creates a decent acoustic balance, while simultaneously providing additional functionality for the room. They achieve the effect of introducing acoustic products without interfering with the design or layout of the limited space.
The results
These recommendations, along with others made by ZENFEEL such as special ceilings and installation methods, meant that the new office was an aurally comfortable environment to work in. The acoustic treatment was adaptive, using different products in different ways depending on the layout and purpose of each space. The correct balance of reverberation, and sound insulation, was successfully achieved.
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