Designing with Sound: Integrating Acoustic Solutions w/ Zack Belanger

Welcome to another episode of the Innovative Real Estate Podcast! In this episode, we sit down with Zackery Belanger, the visionary founder of the acoustic studio Umbel. Zack brings a wealth of unique educational and hands-on experience to the table, reshaping how we think about the relationship between physical structures and the soundscapes they create.

We dive deep into the fascinating world of architectural acoustics, exploring everything from the historical origins of the field to modern-day applications like the use of recycled foam for superior sound design at Detroit’s own El Club. Zack breaks down the complex elements of architecture, the truth about how materials like glass interact with sound, and practical methods for reducing sound travel in your own home. We also explore the importance of testing systems post-construction and how relentless curiosity drives true innovation in building design.

Episode Highlights:

• Zack Belanger’s work with Umbel. 
• The intersection of architecture and sound.
• Designing El Club’s superior acoustics with recycled foam.
• The truth about glass as an acoustic absorber.
• Actionable methods for reducing sound travel at home.
• Why testing systems post-construction is a game-changer.

View the full Show Notes for Episode 81.

To learn more about Umbel, head over to their website, and connect with Zack on LinkedIn:
Check out Acoustic Ornament HERE. 

Ready to move forward with your project? Contact us here and we will put you in contact with the right member of our team.

Make sure to follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn to stay up to date on new project releases, trainings, and more. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

How can we see acoustics in a more holistic way? One that includes ornamentation and the products.

SPEAKER_00 0:06

We could go down such a rabbit hole of philosophy and theory at this point.

SPEAKER_02 0:10

The rise of modernism and things got more and more reverberant. It was this real separation of acoustics from architecture. I told you I was gonna learn things today.

SPEAKER_01 0:31

Today we are coming back with a guest on the show, which we're very excited to host Zachary Bellinger. And um, we we are gonna talk a lot about sound, uh, and um we're gonna learn something. I'm gonna learn something, that's for sure. And hopefully we all walk away with a better understanding of how sound operates and what we can do to maybe control it and why you can't really control it, and you should hire somebody who knows what they're talking about, as we often talk so much about on this podcast. But uh I'm Breck. We have Jill here with us today. Jill, you want to say hi?

SPEAKER_00 1:05

Hello, Director of Projects here.

SPEAKER_01 1:08

And we have Zach. So I will do my best to give him a handoff introduction because a man educated in gravitational physics, trained in acoustic architecture, and immersed in pitting these two experiences against each other is is hard to wrap into words. I know Zach because uh I play played music. I'm a lifelong musician, and uh, so I go to a lot of shows now, and I've been standing in a room. Uh, it's it's one of my favorite venues in the entire city of Detroit. It was my favorite venue to ever play in the city of Detroit, and that's El Club. And I'm standing there and I'm like, wow, this sounds so good. And then because I'm an architect, I'm required to look up in every room that I enter. So I looked up and I was like, oh wow, this is really cool. And then I looked at the walls and I looked around me and I'm like, it sounds good because it was designed by somebody. Turns out that somebody happens to be on the call with us today. Uh, and so Jill tracked him down and found his studio, which we're gonna talk about. And we actually got to go over there and meet him and tour him. And uh, and now we're friends, I think, if you'll accept us.

unknown 2:18

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 2:19

All right. Well, that's enough blabbering from me. Zach, thanks for coming on the show today. Uh, nice to meet you. Why don't you say hello to the audience and tell us a bit about who you are and what you do?

SPEAKER_02 2:30

Um, yeah, uh, thanks for having me. It's nice to nice to be here, be able to talk about acoustics a bit. Um you you covered the basics there. I I'm um a consultant in acoustics, I and I get into design and experimental work as well. That's it in a nutshell.

SPEAKER_00 2:50

Can you tell us a little bit more about your background with everything in New York? Your residence at the experimental media and performing arts center in particular?

SPEAKER_02 2:59

Yeah, I well, I studied physics originally, and then I decided I wanted to be an architect. And I didn't become an architect, but I did have some schooling in architecture uh in Chicago, actually at UIC. Um, and there I landed a job with a company called Kierkegaard Associates, a well-established um firm, acoustics consulting firm. And the most important project I worked on when I was there, which was in the aughts, was the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, MPAC, out in Troy, New York. And uh that project opened, that was by Grimshaw Architects. And when I say it was uh an important project, I just mean that we we had we innovated a lot of things. The the the synergy between the architect and consultant was was great. And um the owner of ownership and the owner's representative, the director of MPAC, his name was Johannes Gobel. He's since retired. Um, he was great. So that these parts came together, and this really spectacular building came out of it that um really is not like anything I've been involved in since. And I don't honestly expect to be involved in anything like it ever again. Um when my time at Kierkegaard was coming to a close around 2010, I decided to go out to Troy, New York. I basically followed the building out there because I think one of the unfortunate things about architecture is that when you're done with a project, you just move on to the next one. You often don't get a chance to really learn about what you just did. And so I needed a bit of a change and I had an opportunity out there to go spend time in and around the building that I had worked on. And so I did that for um about five years. I actually enrolled in the School of Architecture at RPI, intending to do a PhD and a loop-in research on MPAC while I was there. That didn't go as planned, uh, but I did end up doing a research residency at MPAC. And um, that's really the the place where I started to think, I think differently about how we approach acoustics, where I really started to ask the question of why it felt so separated from architecture. Um, and eventually when my time in Troy was done, I I decided to move to Detroit and start a business. And that's where I still am.

SPEAKER_01 5:37

So you got a you got the chance to work on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and then you took a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity after that to stick around and to immerse yourself in that work. That's that's not an opportunity that a lot of people get to have, which is which is incredible. And I think that's that's a thing that keeps this this industry so on its toes and fast moving, is that we're never doing the same thing twice. Um, but that also, yeah, that can be that can definitely be a tough reality when like things are happening so fast. Like a lot of things are under construction, you know, and we can't be there every single phase of things like uh like we'd like to be, certainly. Um, because it'd be a learning experience. But yeah, buildings are complicated. And this is a good reminder that like I tell people architecture is a good, well-rounded profession that includes a lot of things. It is getting more complicated daily, not less complicated. And you're a great example of of how many, many different tracks uh of careers are birthed out of just that education and a starting point to round you and get you interested in the arts on like more of a professional level.

SPEAKER_02 6:48

Yeah, I I I agree completely. And and in acoustics, it's it tends to attract people who have um a mix of backgrounds, some mix of architecture, uh physics, mathematics, music. Nobody comes with all of those things, engineering. Um, but most people come with like two of them, and then you're and then you're just learning so much uh on the job. I mean, I I came into acoustics with uh substantial education in physics and a little bit of architecture um education, uh, but everything about acoustics and everything about how buildings actually go together, I learned on the job uh while I was at Kierkegaard Associates. It's it's amazing how much you don't know about one of those fields that you really need to know a lot about. And honestly, I'm amazed that buildings come together at all. It it is so so many moving parts, you know, and and so many really critical moving parts. I mean, acoustics often is not thought about because there are other more important things like safety, for example, uh, that that architects have to think about.

SPEAKER_01 7:57

But it comes down to comfort and and comfort of space. Like that's that's the un that's it's the intangible thing about buildings that you can't explain to people. And then that's that's hard. Like it is a science to it, but also like it is hard to explain to people why. Like, if I move this window, now all of a sudden the building looks ugly, and nobody can like really express why, but you're like, it's wrong, something's wrong. Uh, I think people feel out of place in a lot of areas, and then it's like, yeah, it's moisture and humidity content in the air, it's the acoustics, it's this these things that you can't necessarily touch and feel as part of a building, but they're so integral to this. But to you know, to this whole conversation, like architects have been doing this a long time, and we're gonna be doing this a long time in the future. I know that your work has kind of bridged this fine line between like performance and and aesthetic, like truly art. I mean, I know like some of the people who are who are listening in this podcast aren't gonna be able to see behind you, but I know you're sitting in your studio, which I've visited, and you've got a very cool sculpture on the wall behind you that that does help mitigate some sound a little bit. But uh you uh you were the author of an essay that I've I've picked up on on the internet um about acoustic ornament. I'm wondering if this is all tied into like what's your take in terms of like how acoustics play a role in architecture and how they can how they can kind of dance together, I guess.

SPEAKER_02 9:25

Yeah, uh big it's a big question. Um, but uh if I if I try to make it concise, um I would say that we currently don't recognize how integral acoustics already is to our buildings. And what what I mean by that is every time you make a decision about the size of a room, about the materials of the wall, about what's going to be in that room, about the shape of the room, about the structure if it's exposed, you're actually making decisions that that affect acoustics. And I think that one of the biggest problems of 20th century acoustics was that we had this productization. I still I use that word a lot. I don't think it's actually a word, but a productization of acoustics, where we started to think about acoustics only as the products that we buy and add to the space. And we lost track, I think, of the fact that everything else uh really, really matters. And there was a time not that long ago before modernism when uh ornamentation was prevalent. It was three-dimensional, it was visually beautiful, and it was it was um adding complexity to the shape of our rooms, and it was therefore helping the sound of our rooms. Uh, ornamentation really, as far as I'm concerned, there was never a time when it didn't have a function. It always had at least an acoustic function, whether it was intentional or not. And so in the 20th century, I think a lot of that ornamentation went away with the rise of modernism and things got more and more reverberant, and we started to add acoustic panels in to take care of that reverberation. And it was this real separation, I think, of acoustics from from architecture. And that's really the basis of the of the essay is that the that I'm actually a big believer in the acoustic products. I work with a lot of great product manufacturers. And the nice thing is that those products are engineered to have a very strong effect on the room, but it would be a mistake to think that that's the only thing that has a strong effect on the room. And the essay Acoustic Ornament really just tries to dig into that and ask Um, you know, how can we see acoustics in a more uh holistic way? One that includes ornamentation as we, you know, and the products as we move forward.

SPEAKER_01 11:51

See, I told you I was gonna learn things today. You're I mean, you're you're putting me into a totally different thought process here because uh I mean, yeah, acoustics were designed into buildings that we learn about in like in Greece. Like, you know, like I we don't talk about them today unless it's an auditorium. Then of course you have to, you know, mind the sound panels and the silly framed roof and all this other weird stuff. But like other than that, nobody's talking about this. Like, there was no pioneer like there was of like advent of lighting or color or landscaping. Like, I have a silly question. Maybe it's not silly to you, but like who were who who is like a a household name, a pioneer of sound in space that we would recognize? Like who sets the stage for us thinking about sound in spaces?

SPEAKER_02 12:42

Uh I don't know. That's a good question. I mean, the one who started all of this um in the late 19th century in the 1890s was Wallace Saban. You might have heard of Sabinet. Yes. We named him after, yeah. So uh we named that after Saban. Um, but the field of acoustics really didn't get started until about the middle of the 20th century. And it was a couple of uh firms, Leo Baranek in particular was one of the pioneers in that world. Um, also an acquisition with the name of Vanaklazen. And then there's a there's a handful of them. Um, you know, but those original firms, they advanced and split off and you know, created new firms, and we're really only a few generations deep into this, into this field. And so um it's relatively new, and I don't think there are a whole lot of famous people. There are there are acquisitions who we all know about, but they're not household names in the way that a lot of famous architects are, for example.

SPEAKER_01 13:47

So interesting. And I have to imagine that a lot of it does come down to building sciences. And I guess I I accidentally made a good point earlier, which is like the idea of like a master builder where one individual could understand like every component of a large structure and like oversee it coming together. It's gone. It's out the window. Like, I don't know how an AC compressor works from top to bottom. There's somebody who does. Um, and we all have to work together. It is the buildings are the product of a village. Like, there's hundreds, thousands of people that are contributing their efforts, whether they're physically there on site or whether they're manufacturing parts that are coming together as components that assemble modern buildings. That's hard to control sound in that, as opposed to like, hey, it's shaped stone and we're gonna set these blocks in this position. That you can start to understand sound. So uh tall order from your line of work. And I think this bridges into um a great opportunity to for you to talk about the work that you're doing today, because you are kind of unique. I haven't met a whole lot of studios that are doing exactly what you're doing. Um, I'm gonna say I haven't met any other studios that are doing what you're doing. And if I have met them, they've talked to you. So um, so why don't you talk a little bit about your studio? Uh, tell us what it is, how we can find you. Let's start there. Um, and then let's move on to like who are the clients that you're working with and some of the projects you'd like to highlight for us.

SPEAKER_02 15:17

Sure. Um, yeah, the name of my studio is Umbull. Uh, it's named after a flower structure, U M B E L. And this is a relatively new rebrand for us. I think for um a long time, a lot of my work was falling under the name ArcGeometer, which is not a great name from a business and marketing perspective. It's a little bit um too complicated, even though it's made of very simple parts. Um, but I decided uh recently that I needed to get serious about telling the world about what we're doing here. And um, you know, there's a number of lenses you can look at it through. One of them is standard consulting, which means that we can be hired to be a part of a design team and we will help guide the architects, the interior designers, the building owners in their decision making so that their buildings perform acoustically. And we work on not just um rooms that are critical to sound, like recording studios and performing arts centers. We also do a lot of normal buildings like residential and office spaces and things, really, really any you can bring acoustic knowledge to any architectural project and make it better. Uh so the core is really consulting. Um, we have an arm of that that I think we're the only ones doing this right now, where we actually also provide consulting services to manufacturers of products. Like we were we were integral in the combining of acoustics and lighting that uh LiteArt led the way on back in 2017. And we also do a lot of work for a company called Three Form, which most people have heard of. Um, they have an acoustics division and a handful of other ones too. Faultright is one of our is also one of our clients. They're doing really well hitting the um the uh you know, red not just the residential market, but making it easier for people to buy to buy um acoustic products. Uh but then the more interesting stuff to me is like the more experimental work, thinking differently about sound. It even really starts to push into the art world, I think, because we do things that are a lot more sculptural, a lot more visual. We are trying to push the boundaries of materials and how they're used acoustically and ask interesting questions and uh present interesting installations that that we that we hope help uh move the the conversation forward.

SPEAKER_00 17:51

I'm gonna jump in because I know that we touched briefly on this beautiful sculpture that's behind you. So that was one of your office experiments. But then you also gave us a really charming story about L Club when we wanted to hear more of the history about how that space came to be and why is this sound so superior to any other music venue that we've been to? And it's right here in our hometown in Detroit. I was wondering if you could highlight a little bit since we're already on that topic.

SPEAKER_02 18:17

Uh on L Club?

SPEAKER_00 18:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 18:18

Yeah. Yeah. That one was a yeah, that was about 10 years ago, I guess, at the time. And the architect was Lavu. Um, that was Kaya Woolett's um firm. Uh, I believe it's since dissolved, but um that might not be true. Don't hold me to that.

SPEAKER_01 18:35

Yeah, I believe she she moved town. Um, she still has a firm and is operating. Yeah, good did good work when she was in Detroit, too.

SPEAKER_02 18:42

Excellent work, yeah. Yeah. Um, so that one, let me see. The the the part of it that I think is pretty fascinating is that when you go in, you basically see all the normal materials uh that you would expect in an existing building. There's a lot of concrete block. I believe there's a plaster layer on the wall. You see concrete floors. If you look up in a lot of parts of the ceiling, you see exposed wood joists. You also see these very prominent uh large melamine foam wedges. Um, and those are really serious acoustic treatment. They are about two feet deep, I think, and they're blocks of basotect uh melamine foam. And uh the story goes that there's no way that that project could afford um that kind of acoustic foam. But uh it just happened at the time that I heard of a uh an art installation, an artist name Henri Sala, I believe. He had an installation in New York City at the New Museum. And uh this installation was only to last about three months, and he uh had an incredible budget, apparently, because they covered the walls and I think even some of the floor with these really deep foam wedges. And I had heard from a friend that those wedges were going to be discarded at the end of the front, at the end of the installation, so which seems crazy by the way, because that's some expensive foam. I I think it was hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of foam. Um you know, we added up just getting tossed. Yeah, because it's different. Foam is tough to ship because it's I mean, it's lightweight, but it just takes up a lot of space, you know, so you need a lot of room. And uh I have a good friend um out from my Troy days named Ben Chatterby. And we got to talking, we hatched a plan to um basically show up with a couple of semi-trucks at the new museum and haul away the felt wedges. And one of the trucks um went upstate, and we parted some of the wedges out to a couple of projects up there, and one of them came to Detroit, and that's the the wedges on the ceiling of the outclub came from that installation, they were diverted from a landfill basically. And it was really lucky.

SPEAKER_01 21:04

There's the truth of the matter. Like, I mean, my resume would say like repurposed installation, but like the truth of the matter was like that that sound attenuation that blew my mind was picked out of a trash.

unknown 21:18

It's okay.

SPEAKER_02 21:19

And then so when you look at the room, I mean it was such a beautiful alignment because you need not just something like that, but like these wedges, uh, or you that's what you really want. But that room is so massive, it's so heavy, um, and it's good proportions that you, you know, if you could design it from the ground up, you'd be asking for concrete floor, you'd be asking for walls that were that heavy. And it just happens that on the ceiling where there aren't wedges, that the joists act as a very nice natural diffusion. And then where the wedges are, it's a very deep absorption. So you've got you've got this really nice, this lovely mix of things. And doesn't hurt that they invested in a great audio system there. I wouldn't be able to even tell you who the manufacturer was, but um but you could look it up. But yeah that helps a lot too. So yeah that is a it's a lovely little club. I think all of the parts really really came together well.

SPEAKER_01 22:17

I think it's just a great project uh to highlight as we have a brief conversation with you here today is because like after meeting you and and seeing your website and then seeing the work that you're actually doing in practice, uh it's not like I I get the corporate side of things. Like you design some of these products and you help with the testing of these products that like just get absorbed into the building universe like drywall or nails do. But on the other hand like you're so artistic and you're you're scrappy honestly with it. Like what's a word I'm I'm I'm like I'm looking for but it's like the creativity uh like the the ingenuity that you and your team are are pulling off it's like what what do we have you know it's the it's the true ingenuity of it that that really excites me. I mean I I remember I was tapping on some glass on your floor and I was kind of curious and you're like oh yeah those are the those are the windshield the car windshields were melting into position and then poking holes in so that they you know control sound and my my brain is just melting in in your studio.

SPEAKER_02 23:25

So like one of the one of the uh maybe it's worth a couple words about that project um because that was a that's one that we're really proud of um it was done it's called long range and it was done in collaboration with Katie Newell and Wes McGee both at the University of Michigan but um glass has this really bad reputation in acoustics for being reverberation promoting um but when you look at acoustic absorbers like fiberglass you you see that it's also glass so fiberglass is glass and plate glass is glass and so that begs the question what's happening there? Why is one version of it really reflective to sound and one version's absorptive and if you go deeper into that you start to think about shape and how shape and scale and how much those things matter. And that's this type of thinking which is also covered in acoustic ornament led us to this idea that we're going to take auto glass and start to shape it to try to get to take it from this reflective condition to get um diffusion and absorption and transmission and really try to get all of the acoustic properties out of it. And it led to a single quite sculptural installation I think it's about 30 feet long where when you go from one side you start out um as a reflect acoustically reflective and it gets increasingly complicated in its shape as you move down the length of it it goes into acoustically diffusive and acoustically absorptive. And the whole point of that project was just to show that if you understand how form and material work and how they relate to acoustics you can really get into some some really interesting design territory.

SPEAKER_01 25:09

Well it's almost like you took it as a challenge you're like I'm gonna take the the worst material possible and we're gonna make it something useful.

SPEAKER_02 25:16

That's what we did. We went up taking it to the acoustic lab and the only thing I wanted was to just get absorption out of it like significant absorption and to show that that absorption increased as the form changed. And yeah it didn't even matter to me whether it was really high absorption or anything. We just wanted to show we could do it.

SPEAKER_00 25:35

And I think it's a really beautiful form of relentless curiosity and trademark that for your team because I think that that's what suits you really well to have these types of conversations with architects that are also curious about how we can be more innovative about materials that just already exist and how do we test them and figure out how it impacts the space that we're in like that type of feedback is so cool to me.

SPEAKER_02 25:59

Yeah yeah I'm glad to hear it I I find that too I mean the architects are the ones who get really excited about this. Like every architect should know that a waffle slab is better acoustically than a flat slab. And they're both concrete, right? So that's in now we're in really interesting territory. Why is that? Why is it that something that's primarily structural and somewhat visual actually performs better acoustically than something that is that is flat. And that's way more interesting than you should put you know fiberglass panel up on your wallet, which is um which is an oversimplification but a lot of consulting is that we just tell people how much product and where to add it. But there is a yeah there's a much more interesting conversation to be had where um acoustic starts to overlap with all of the things that that architects care about.

SPEAKER_00 26:50

Well Zach, we also had you over Breck's house and so something I wanted to touch base on was a lot of clients keep coming to us with asking about like what are some easy methods that are not cost prohibitive to implement into my house. So residential application to control noise. And we had you over Breck's house because speaking of foam panels reused at L Club, let's talk about Breck's house being literally built out of SIPS foam panels. And so it's so sound tight that you could literally hear a pen drop from one room all the way across the house. So we really honed in on specific rooms and specific applications where minor details were going to make a big impact.

SPEAKER_02 27:30

Can you touch uh a little bit on some of those that we talked about yeah absolutely um I think it's it's it's pretty interesting that when it comes to um um sound transfer, sound getting across a wall system, let's say like from the exterior of a house to the interior um it has a lot to do with the mass of the house it has a lot to do with how well sealed it is so it really starts to overlap with thermal uh properties too if your house is very well sealed thermally it is likely also pretty good acoustically double pane windows are good for uh for slowing heat transfer they're also good for slowing sound and you and you you as you already mentioned uh there's a downside to that because if your house is really quiet then the internal sound the room acoustics or how sound might transfer between spaces becomes more noticeable so I always have to say that the very best way to tackle these problems is in the design phase. It's when you're looking at the way the rooms are laid out relative to each other. That's always the best time to make decisions about layout that could help you acoustically simple things like making sure that the media room where you know somebody might be watching the movie is not directly adjacent to your bedroom where somebody might want quiet. But assuming you already have a house that's built there is still quite a bit that you can do. If you don't mind some renovation and light construction, um adding mass to your walls is a really good way to do it. An extra layer of gypsum board helps a great deal when it comes to reducing sound transfer. Sealing things up helps a lot. We see that a lot where you know if two rooms are both if there's an interior wall that separates two rooms there's often not really a need thermally to isolate that to seal it up and you know use insulation in the cavity. But if you seal things up sound transfer uh will get better.

SPEAKER_00 29:35

Well the sound transfer will be reduced it will be better acoustically yeah something I did want to ask about specifically because we get this question so much from our clients and we typically respond with well sound moves the way that water moves so the more openings that you have the more that sound is going to penetrate. So what about in a loft slash mezzanine type application?

SPEAKER_02 29:56

Yeah uh manage expectations is one uh yeah there's um there's an there's an acoustics researcher and expert named Michael Erman who once said that if you're sharing air, you're sharing sound and I love that and I say it all the time. I think it's a great way to think about this. It is similar to the way that water moves. So if you imagine filling up a room with water and you ask where would that water find its way through the wall into other spaces um then that's that's a good indication of the way the sound will move too. When you have something like an open mezzanine um there is shared air. So there always will be sound that transfers between the mezzanine and the the area below uh you can however uh reduce it a bit if you if you map out um how sound might reflect off of a surface you could always cover that surface with something absorptive you know to it to improve it uh but these are these are these are incremental changes that um that sometimes add up to make somebody happy but it would never offer you know true privacy you you wouldn't want a a mezzanine with a private office or an office that was supposed to be private on top of a living room below there's just no way to ever get true privacy that way unless you're willing to block it off with class or something.

SPEAKER_00 31:18

Yeah and you do you mentioned something really interesting which was like graphs to implicate the data afterwards. And I think that's something that we're increasingly encouraging our clients to spend a little bit of dollars on. And a lot of times by the time you get to that point people are like well my project is done I'm gonna call it a day I'm gonna just enjoy my space but having tangible data to give you proof that a system is working, I think is so important. So we did talk about some of those tests that you could apply at Brex House. Could you kind of touch base on what are some of the tests that you offer and how often are you actually doing them in residential applications?

SPEAKER_02 31:57

Yeah a typical test let's say for sound transfer would be um you would take a loudspeaker and put it in one space and you'd put a microphone in the other and you can you can actually measure how much that sound is being knocked down or blocked by the wall that separates the two. And this is this is a this is easily quantifiable we have metrics for this sort of thing. And you can most importantly you're you're checking to see if it's if it's performing as it was designed because if it's not it might mean that there's something wrong. I think a lot of contractors once they understand some of the basics of this like you needing a good seal they are happy to accommodate you but they often aren't aware of that. So for example if you have a pipe that's penetrating across a wall if that leaves an air gap around it and that allows air to flow then sound will transfer and the whole wall will be compromised from a sound transfer performance perspective. So those tests can help you identify um where you need a little bit of follow through in the construction. And there are also tests for room acoustics we can test reverberation time and things as well we can quantify just about anything. We don't get to do a lot of those tests it is an extra cost but we find that it gives a lot of peace of mind to to some clients who who really just care that their house is going to perform the way that it should.

SPEAKER_00 33:31

Have you ever had a surprise result from one of those tests that you were just like wow I wasn't expecting this yeah uh it the surprises go both ways.

SPEAKER_02 33:40

I mean you frequently get surprises where you learn that the wall isn't performing the way it should be and then you have to diagnose it. You have to track down what's happening. It's not always visible right because it could be uh there could be a piece of trim or something over a gap in the wall and you have to figure out that that that's there. Um it's it doesn't happen very often that surprises us in the other direction but it's happened once or twice that we're surprised how well a wall performs uh you basically you when you design walls you set it's called STC you've probably heard of it sound transmission class you set STC goals and we know generally what what wall types align with what STC ratings and um and every once in a while you get you you you always expect them to perform a little worse in the field than you designed them. We leave about a five point margin for that but every once in a while the wall will just outperform what you think and don't always know why, but you definitely don't question it.

SPEAKER_00 34:40

We could go down such a rabbit hole philosophy and theory at this point because it's so like tangential to what happens in architecture where you produce a rendering and it's like well is it better or worse than the actual built results that's a pretty interesting comment. One question I did want to wrap up with going back to your essay on acoustical ornamentation I was just a little bit curious because you know the saying the devil is in the details it's actually coined by a Starkitect. And so I was curious uh Mies Van Derot is the one that said that he actually said God is in the details. So that's what I wanted to ask you. What is your opinion? Is the devil or God in the details?

SPEAKER_02 35:20

Oh that's a I have no idea I would I I'd probably go you know what I I would need to understand the implications of both of those. I know that's a boring answer. Um I know that the details do matter a great deal.

SPEAKER_00 35:37

And I know but I think that well go ahead yeah well what I was getting at is I think you said something really important earlier where results aren't always visual acoustically so some people might say well ornamentation is just an added fee. I don't have money for this but sometimes that is the factor that's producing better sound.

SPEAKER_02 35:56

Yeah that's yes that's right and I do think that Mies was wrong in his pursuit of um reducing ornamentation and stripping everything back in that way. And I think that in part it's because they they we didn't I think look hard enough into what that ornamentation was doing. And there's also a cultural angle here that's that's incredibly important. I mean to claim that ornamentation has no function that's a that's just a really big claim and I think it's uh I think it's wrong. You know but but what's interesting I guess for me in my daily work is that there is this acoustic underpinning to so much of that ornamentation. Even if somebody did argue that yeah that uh the cultural reasons to keep ornamentation weren't valid which I don't agree with but even if they did you've also got this this building performance reason for it. And I think that it once acoustics is in the mix you open up a lot of other possibilities. I mean the the wall of chairs behind me that was really just an exercise in taking existing furniture and asking how how could we make this furniture more impactful acoustically and do something interesting with it. And in that way it is ornamental right in that it it has a look and it's contributing visually to the room. It's also contributing um acoustically to the room and we use it for seating we pull them down when we need them. So they see you did that for us when we toured that's right yeah you just pull them down as needed and so it's this really um and I'm glad that people like the way it looks because who knows right before you know once you do it but uh you never know whether you're gonna like the end of it. So I I think I sidestepped your question a little but I um you know no I think you actually answered it answered it.

SPEAKER_00 37:47

I think there's so much we can unpack here it wasn't like a light question it's actually deeply loaded with a ton of response. So I appreciate you answering that on the fly. Well I do want to start to wrap us up so I definitely want to make sure that people can reach out to you if they're interested can you just name drop your website socials and some other resources yeah umble.design um be l dot design is the is the best way to find us um I do have some print copies of acoustic ornament left if anybody wants any we had a printing error that like turned out to be a uh a fortuitous thing because we we ended up with uh a lot more copies than we expected and so um those are available if anybody wants one just get in get in touch with amazing well thank you so much for joining us today and I think we have so much more that we can continue to collaborate on. So I appreciate your time thank you Joe see you next time here on innovative real estate with FreeSquared