We have a client in Arizona who wanted us to build him a sound room with a living roof. A sound room you are all familiar with. A living roof may be an other issue. It was also a pleasant surprise for us.

A living roof is a roof designed to support 18″ of top soil and the watering and drainage system necessary to maintain this miniature ecosystem. Supporting 18″ of earth and water is no easy task, especially when the roof size is 25′ x 50′. That is 1875 cubic feet of earth at approximately 20 lbs. / cu. ft. is 37,500 pounds of earth, not to mention the piping for water and drainage. The roof must support 16 tons of earth and pipes.

Earth is an excellent barrier to external noise. Go into your basement and sit quietly. There you are surrounded on 4 sides by earth and concrete. In this project, the roof and 6′ up the 12′ side walls will also be covered with earth. So, in this project we have 1 1/2′ earth on the roof and six more feet of earth on each wall side. Now, we need concrete walls at the correct thickness to match the acoustical properties of 1 1/2′ of earth on the roof.

We determined that an 8″ poured concrete wall all around will meet all our structural issues for ceiling support and acoustical issues for sound transmission class ratings and all external noise measured calculations. The 8″ concrete shell will build a room that is 25′wide and 50′ long. The ceiling height is 12′. One could not ask for a better room size when it comes to acoustical issues that must be dealt with.

At 50′ in the length dimension, even a 20 Hz.wave, which is the lowest wave we usually work with in rooms has some room to run. No low frequency issues or any others for that matter when it comes to the 50″ length dimension.The 25′ width is also good for low frequency, but will give us a few issues. Those issues will be resolved through the use of our activated carbon technology which will be added to the inside walls. A ceiling height of 12′ only increases our room volume and is welcome for all forms of sound playback and recording.

If you spend as much time in your personal listening room as I do, you hear many different things and you become comfortable with the sound in your room because you have worked hard to get it to sound the way you want it to. I believe most of us set up our personal listening environments in a manner that allows us to hear as much of the music as we can. This attention to sonic detail helps us develop an emotional connection with the music.

One of the many things I notice is that when I enter my personal listening environment is that the outside world does not follow me into the room. It is almost like some type of force field that will not allow the energy of the existing and outside world in. This really becomes apparent when you hit the play button on the remote. If the “force field” is strong enough to keep out the outside world by just closing its door, it completes the job when music fills the room. What a joy to not think or hear anything but music; feel anything but emotion.

Sometimes on recordings that you have played over and over, you will hear a new sound. You know the recordings I mean. They are the ones that you know every pause or breath the lead singer takes and every note the guitar player uses on a fiery break. They are your comfort and go to songs when you really need to disconnect. Somehow, someway, you bend down to pick something off the floor and just as your ears move in a vertical plane down the speaker’s vertical axis, you, for a split moment hear something new. You pause, take a breath and reach for the remote. There it is again. Thank you, room !

Sometimes one can connect so well to the music that dancing and air guitar behavior occurs. Now, this is a real connection. It is a digital cable from your ears to your heart. It can be facilitated by time shifting your stream of consciousness through the use of intoxicating beverages. I don’t know why the volume is increased in direct proportion to the amount of fluids ingested. It seems to always be the case when you check the gain control the next morning. Perhaps beverages of this nature should come out with a warning label that states: Expect 10 dB increase in SPL for every 12 ounces consumed.

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