In classrooms, poor acoustics put a strain on teachers’ voices and on student’s learning. The trend to use harder surfaces, e.g. glass, metal and concrete, which reflect sound, further adds to the problem. This design approach creates reverberant rooms which subsequently affects how well a teacher is understood as well as the students ability to concentrate. Another complication is the mix of old and new school buildings in many cities that are not up to current standards for today’s acoustical recommendations. Schools built before the 1970s used many hard surfaces and had very high ceilings, further magnifying the acoustics problem.
When it comes to speech intelligibility young children, in particular, experience difficulties in understanding speech in highly reverberant rooms. Providing an environment designed for clear sound through the right reverberation helps student comprehension. Efficient communication can only be accomplished with low reverberance, lack of echoes and high speech intelligibility – in other words, sound control with high-performing sound-absorptive ceilings. Rockfon ceiling solutions reach the highest level in sound absorption for optimum speech intelligibility.
Sound isolation prevent distractions from next door. To prevent noise from one room disturbing students and teachers in adjacent areas, acoustic standards and guidelines require learning spaces to be separated by sound isolation walls. This proven design approach leads to productive and distraction-free learning. Suspended, modular, or acoustic ceiling systems alone, are simply not able to block sound if the walls between learning spaces stop at the height of the ceiling. This is in part due to noise leaks caused by lights, grilles and diffusers penetrating the ceiling system. But the main reason is that acoustic ceilings do not have enough mass to block sound effectively. All Rockfon stone wool products are UL/ULC certified for NRC.
