As an architect or designer, you know how to create beautiful spaces that address your client's needs. And that's all while managing project timelines, budgets, your team, resources and materials.

With everything going on in a design project, it can be easy to forget the importance—and the impact—of keeping acoustics top-of-mind. It's not enough to create a space that looks good. You want to give your clients a space they can work and function in with maximum productivity and flexibility.

By understanding the impact of acoustics and how they'll affect your project, you can design environments that exceed your client's expectations and result in beautiful, functional spaces.

What follows will provide a better understanding of how to incorporate acoustic planning into your project to ensure a successful design and your client's happiness.

In order to develop an effective acoustic design strategy, you'll need to gather as much acoustic information, as early as possible.

Start by performing an acoustic audit of each new space. The audit should define parameters such as room size, ceiling height, door and window openings, and the room’s use or function.

The audit should also account for local and national building codes around acoustic requirements—if you haven’t already hired a consultant, reaching out to one at this stage can be a big help. This acoustic audit is the foundation of your acoustic strategy, to avoid hiccups (or code violations) later on.

While there are many factors to take in consideration during your audit, there a few you won’t want to miss:

Echoing happens when you have a large, open-concept space, typically with high ceilings and very few walls or partitions to help modulate the reflection of sound.

The way sound passes through walls and floors can negatively affect the acoustic health of your space. Consider which spaces need protection from sound transmission and plan accordingly.

Architects and designers often don’t consider noise that can enter a space from the outside world. This problem can be magnified in dense, urban areas with heavy street traffic. Exterior materials and the placement of windows and doors all have an effect on outside noise transmission.

Organizing rooms directly adjacent to one another (that often have drastically opposite acoustic needs) can create problems in both of those spaces. For example, putting a break room beside a conference room that is frequently used for client meetings can be disastrous if not handled properly.

Air conditioning fans, washing machines, and other equipment can cause vibrations that negatively affect the noise comfort of an interior space.

The good news is, these issues can be mitigated with the proper acoustic strategy. However, that strategy needs to feed off of your initial audit. That’s why the audit should include a detailed list of what could go wrong from an acoustic perspective. From there, you can determine the scope of fixing or preventing acoustic complications, which can be fed into the project budget in a way that makes sense for your client.

Once you’ve analyzed and assessed the potential problem areas of each room, it’s time to start planning your strategy for managing the space's acoustics. We’ve broken these strategies into short-term and long-term solutions.

These strategies are aimed at people who are dealing with acoustic issues in the immediacy. Maybe you have a hotel, restaurant, home, or office space that is in desperate need of triage to help subdue some of the problems we listed earlier. These strategies are quick, inexpensive, and can hold you over until more permanent solutions are in place.

Designers might have trouble with sound transmission between floors, or even echo effects in large spaces. Area rugs can help to dampen that sound and make the adjacent spaces more acoustically comfortable. Rugs also work effectively as accent pieces, adding further appeal to your design.

For hotels or offices that are adjacent to busy streets in dense urban areas, install heavy curtains in front of street-facing windows. This will help mitigate undesired street noise. The curtains can also help modulate light, insulate the space and provide privacy for interior spaces.

For large, open spaces such as an office or art gallery, use an off-the-shelf system for creating zones of personal or group workspace. These can help create isolated interior areas that are semi-acoustically protected. These panelized systems also help organize interiors into functional hubs that would otherwise be left open and chaotic.

Wall treatments are a common way to provide a room with soundproofing without spending money tearing down and rebuilding entire sections of wall. This is most appropriate for areas that need total acoustic isolation. 

If you’re working on a ground-up new construction project, or planning a total renovation, these long-term strategies will help you plan out a holistic acoustic approach for the space. These are big-picture solutions that act as the foundation around which the rest of your acoustic fine-tuning will be built.

Designing spaces based on function, wayfinding, and proximity to other spaces is an essential part of the programming phase of design. When going through these early concepts, it’s important to consider how adjacent spaces might affect each other acoustically. For instance, putting a waiting area or lobby right next to private offices might cause disruption for employees in your space. 

You'll also want to ensure that all doors, adjacent walls, windows and doors are sealed properly from outside sound. Look for any gaps around the frames of windows and doors, and check for any openings in the ceiling. Sealing up these areas will help prevent noise from traveling into your space.

A sound masking system can provide additional solutions. By introducing unstructured sound (like airflow) into your space, a structured sound (like human speech) becomes unintelligible. The result is increased privacy and a more focused, productive workforce.

In large, open-concept spaces, echoing can be a huge concern. However, by using baffles, dampers, or other acoustic treatments, the echoing effect is massively reduced. Ceiling treatments can also be used to help create separate nodes in larger areas for private, more quiet acoustic spaces.

Back to the modular, panelized wall system—these can also be used as permanent strategies given their flexibility to change over time, depending on how the function of a space might transform. This is great for small business environments where personnel needs might shift, based on growth or recession in the company. 

If your project budget can afford bringing on a professional acoustic engineer to help with the planning and strategy phase of the design, you absolutely should do it. If you’re just looking to muffle sound from your upstairs neighbors, you can probably handle that yourself.

And, even if you’re on a tight budget that didn’t initially allow you to hire a professional, this is something you might upsell to the client. Explain how important the acoustic success of their project is. With an experienced consultant advising the process, anyone who occupies the new space will be more comfortable, happier, and even more productive.

In the end, it’s all about value, if using a consultant can increase the value of your work and what you deliver to clients, do it and don’t look back.

Now that you’ve identified potential issues, outlined a few strategies based on the size and scope of your design, and maybe even hired a consultant to help pull it all together, you’re ready to start preparing for the design development phase of your project.

In this phase, you’ll begin to make a list of tools, methods, and techniques to start putting together a practical outline of how to execute your strategies. Here are a few things to keep in mind as you gear up for the final push.

Your acoustic solutions arsenal comes in many forms. These are the products, ideas, appliances, systems, and material suppliers that all help you lay out your design strategies in terms of real, tangible construction components. Talk with your consultant to understand which of these tools are the most appropriate for each design strategy, and how they might affect other aspects of the design.

This is where the audit you did at the start of the project becomes so crucial. It's the guide that allows you to use each tool in your arsenal in a way that makes the project successful.

When it comes to a full understanding of what client expectations and needs look like in a project, this is where the architect’s input can save the day. Architects are the closest to the design process, and should have the best understanding of how the building needs to operate in order to meet their client's goals.

These needs will vary greatly, so it’s vital for the designer and architect to work together. By understanding and creating a hierarchy between the primary needs, secondary, and tertiary, it's possible to prioritize project goals (like functionality, building health, and sustainability).

Then you must understand how the approach to each acoustic strategy might affect those design concepts, and make sure they act to enhance and not detract from them.

Much of the information pertaining to acoustic solutions for building design can be found on the internet. However, when it comes to specifying actual products, that search might get a bit more complicated. It helps to talk to other architects, builders, or product representatives and build a database of reliable acoustic products.

Also, this is where it helps to have a consultant on hand. They will know better than anyone where to get the right products, how much they should cost and how best to use those solutions in a design. The more complex the project, the more vital it becomes to have an experienced professional on hand to get the most out of your acoustic solutions.

Putting together the budget and critical path schedule for a construction project might not be the most exciting part of your job. But it's probably the most important phase of a project, when considering client expectations.

In this phase, architects and builders must work together to outline the budget, refine it, and get it to a point where all parties feel comfortable with moving forward.

Depending on the scope of your project, you might be either including acoustic solutions into a much larger budget, or planning a few short-term fixes for your home or office. No matter which category you fall under, it’s important to put together a comprehensive budget together to include items like:

• Material costs
• Labor
• Taxes and overhead
• Contractor’s fees

You should have a list of products, materials, or other items that are part of your arsenal to take on your acoustic strategy. Source these items with the help of an acoustic consultant, then plug those numbers into your budget. When your acoustic strategy is part of a much larger job, you’ll likely be baking those costs into things like finish materials, insulation, mechanical equipment, and appliances.

It’s important to get the acoustic measures into the budget early and in a way that they make sense for other vital design components so they don’t get value engineered out of the project down the line.

All that’s left to do is apply everything you’ve learned to the execution of the acoustic design. Using your audits, your research, your short and long-term strategies, your consultant, and your budget, you’re ready to start scheduling subcontractors to get things done.

Throughout the construction process, it’s a good idea to test the acoustic measures you’ve outlined in the design to make sure it’s all going according to plan. There are third-party inspectors who will come to the job site and test each space based on echoing, sound transmission, outside noise, etc.

If you’ve done enough work on the front end, the planning should work itself out automatically. Stick to the foundation of knowledge you’ve spend so much time building, and lean on those things when issues come up along the way (and they will).

One way to help your project run smoothly is to utilize project management tools. These go beyond Microsoft Project. There are a few tools we’ve come across that might meet your own project needs:

Slack - A great online app that lets teams communicate with each other on a number of different topics, groups, or channels.

Momentum – Set daily tasks, get reminders for project deadlines, and stay motivated with a personalized calendar experience, available for free in the Chrome store.

Asana - An online app that is best used as a task manager for internal teams. It’s great for small-to-medium sized teams that have varying deadlines and task capacities.

Revit - If you’re going to be drafting the drawings and making schedules for specifications, these are the two best available for managing construction documents.

SketchUp - A free tool from Google that is best served as a 3D design tool. It’s easy to learn, and can be shared with clients and builders to help understand the design intent of each space.

Following this guide should give you a great place to start and ensure acoustics are considered throughout the project timeline. It takes practice to get things right, and the more acoustic related design you do, the more you’ll improve.

The best way to see if your acoustic strategies are successful is to follow up with your clients and ask them a series of pointed questions regarding the design. This should give you an idea of where things worked out, and maybe where they didn’t. Use this post-mortem and apply it to your next project.

After a few acoustic design projects, you should have enough information to build yourself a comprehensive checklist. It's this kind of information that will help guarantee success during every one of your projects. This should be a document you use from the audit all the way through construction.

Hopefully now you have a better idea of why acoustic design is so important, and how you can start integrating acoustic health into your next project. Your clients will be happier, and you’ll be executing better projects in the long run.