A word on Acoustic Design

Apropos our discussion on soundscapes Wednesday night, I had observed that there is a slightly counter-intuitive aspect to the libraries acoustic environment. If you know the first thing about acoustic design - and that's all I know -you know that soft, faceted surfaces absorb sound. Thus the foam egg-crate walls in recording studios. The less corners or facets on a wall, the better sound is projected. Thus a band shell. The library is a loud building. The plan of the main floor is typically Beaux-Arts: one large space divided into three bays arranged around a rectangular central hall. The floor in the central hall is tile. Other floors are hardwood, no carpeting. On top of that, each of the three bays is an apsidal hall - meaning in plan, they terminate in a semi-circle. There is a lot of lovely woodwork, but it accounts for only a small portion of the wall surface. Most of the walls are hard, smooth plaster. The tall windows, I'm assuming, also provide plenty of smooth, hard surface area for sound to bounce off.

So you can hear sounds from the other side of the library as if they were happening next to you; the sound of a mouse click or someone adjusting themselves in their chair. A conversation at normal interior volume would seem incredibly obnoxious to most people. I'm accustomed to libraries being sound-deadening spaces: acoustic tile on the ceilings, carpets throughout. Perhaps the fact that this is a sound-amplifying space forces people to regulate themselves in a way a quieter, more absorptive room would not. Conversations that occured were in a lowered voice, and people walk gingerly around the space. The acoustic design, intentionally or not, is very effective at keeping people quiet. The question is: what are the implications of the distinction between regulating your behavior based on cultural norms and regulating your behavior based on the physical characteristics of a space?