soundproofing
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This NYC music venue uses springs to soundproof itself
National Sawdust is an event space that took five years (and a bunch of engineering magic) to realize. Based in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the building is a nonprofit looking into the creative process behind making music. Which we're sure is fascinating, but it's the design that caught our attention. Early into the project designers conceived of a box-in-box arrangement, keeping the outers shell, but building something new inside it. While it solved several design issues, it also meant no sound traveled inside the performance space and no sound escaped. That said, being cited in the middle of NYC — that wasn't quite enough. With a subway running underneath the venue and heavy traffic outside, the designers decided to lift the new building's design above roughly 1,000 springs, dampening noise and converting that energy into heat.
Caltech researchers devise acoustic diode that sends sound one-way, could harvest energy
Sound has this habit of traveling in more than one direction -- useful in most circumstances, but not so welcome when a person in one room is looking for a little peace and quiet while someone in the next is blasting music. Sound-proofing is one solution to that problem, but some researchers at Caltech say they've now come up with a better one: an acoustic diode that can be tuned to allow sound to pass through in only one direction. As you might expect, however, that's all still very much in the early stages, but the researchers say the technology could eventually allow for "true soundproofing," or even be used for other purposes, like scavenging sound energy from structural vibrations and turning that into electricity. The official announcement with some of the finer details is after the break, and the researchers' full paper is published in the July 24th issue of Nature Materials.
