The era of hybrid work has created an acoustical conundrum for offices. Once bemoaned for the cacophony created by workers chattering and clicking away in their open floor plans, offices are now facing a different kind of issue with noise: There’s not enough of it.
Whereas once, workers were used to a steady din of phone calls and interoffice babbling to make up the white noise of the officescape, the typical white collar office has since devolved into a reverberant echo chamber of one-sided Zoom meetings and the clip-clop of shoes traversing deserted hallways. “There is such a thing as too quiet,” says Benjamin Sachwald, senior vice president for acoustics, noise, and vibration at the environmental engineering firm AKRF.
To counter that too-quiet environment, and to better design around the kinds of noise issues that can make a space annoying, uncomfortable, or even unhealthy, the acoustical engineers at AKRF have developed a novel sound-modeling system that can “auralize” the design of physical spaces and play them back to designers and clients alike. The system is called the PinDrop, and it’s a sort of a music-studio control room and mastering suite that can take digital architectural models and the specifications of acoustic materials to create precise aural representations of what a space sounds like.
“You have a space that was designed originally for 150 people, but if there’s typically only 50 or 75 people using it now, there’s a lot less background sound,” says Sachwald. “The noise floor dropping now allows you to hear a lot more intrusive sounds.”
For those half-empty offices, the PinDrop can be used to determine how much sound buffering to add or take away. For a school near an airport, for example, it can show designers which interior materials and window treatments will best buffer the sounds of takeoffs and landings.
Located in AKRF’s Manhattan office, the PinDrop is a sound-isolated space, capable of eliminating almost all background noise. With room for up to 15 people, the studio can act as a sound simulator, creating a playback of all the sounds in a specific architectural space. It can create the sound of speech as it would be heard from the front row of a lecture hall or the back corner of its balcony. Or the sound of a passing train running next to the conference room of a proposed office. Or that same conference room with a door made of wood instead of glass.
Like a music studio, different parameters can be adjusted to find the ideal mix of spatial design, interior furnishing, and acoustical treatments. “It really empowers our collaborators to make that informed decision based on their ears and their subjective experience, as a supplement to all the science that goes into our work,” says Sachwald.
The PinDrop combines detailed sound measurements, specifications from the manufacturers of acoustic panels and floor treatments, and data AKRF has collected over decades about the acoustical performance of different rooms post occupancy. Adding in digital models of architectural spaces, the PinDrop creates a scientifically accurate rendering of what such a space would sound like under various design and use conditions. That could be a hotel lobby with a specific pattern of ceiling tiles or an open-plan office that’s suddenly only half occupied.
The tool will be useful for both retrofits of existing spaces and the design of completely new environments, whether concert halls, senior-living facilities, or hybrid-first offices. Nathaniel Fletcher, senior acoustical consultant at AKRF, says the PinDrop’s variable metrics allow designers to hear the acoustical performance of various design approaches while also enabling them to understand their budget and material implications. “Rather than just throw a bunch of numbers at them, which are technically accurate, we provide them with a technically accurate experience so that they’re able to make the best decision for their project,” Fletcher says.
Sachwald says AKRF is currently using the PinDrop for a number of clients, including some who are trying to redefine their offices—ditching open plan and adding in a mix of heads-down workstations, small meeting rooms, and larger collaboration spaces. These new layouts, and the new ways work happens in them, are still being defined, and the PinDrop’s sound simulations are enabling designers to quickly test out different treatments before they commit to one plan and start building. Hearing each design, Sachwald says, will allow more experimentation and more informed decision-making. “They get to experience it during the design phase instead of just hoping for the best,” he says.
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