CMU School of Drama


Thursday, September 10, 2020

Is A Drop Ceiling The Acoustical Ceiling?

ProSoundWeb: Drop ceiling tiles are commonly found in commercial buildings, so it’s likely that in a professional audio career you will encounter them. They look decent, are cheap to install and maintain, and can cover lots of ugly utility such as wires, HVAC ducts, and sprinkler system piping.

1 comment:

Elliot Queale said...

I find architectural acoustics highly fascinating, because the math behind most of the phenomenon is the same math that dictates so many other fields in engineering. In particular, frequency response is a critical aspect of analog signal processing in electrical engineering, or vibration dampening in mechanical systems design. Here, my mind immediately gets drawn to an acoustical low-pass filter, since the author draws the conclusion that the drop ceiling tiles allow for sub 500Hz frequencies to pass right through it, while blocking higher frequencies. This makes me start to think of drop ceiling tiles as acoustic inductors, with increasing impedance as frequencies increase. Albeit a weak and simple analogy, I think it can help us make real decisions in our design process. It's like structures: we may not bust out the textbook to calculate beams and columns for every show or even once a year, but the fundamental understanding of how structures behave informs our decisions.