How do I intend to help improve my school's acoustics to better enable learning in the classroom? Good question! Something that I have noticed during my 4 years here is the terrible acoustics that seem to be in almost every classroom in the school. In Slocum and Weaver, the high ceilings cause quite a problem while in Hunter, the cementer floor, walls and ceilings in every classroom cause the noise disruption.

Concrete is a great material to use when the goal is to keep sound inside one room, however because it is a thick, hard surface, it reflects sound back in the direction it came from; this causes reverberation. While it is known that two hard, flat walls can cause a lot of reverberation, there is not much that can be done because almost all rooms are shaped in that way. However, the material used can really improve the acoustics of a space.

Emma Willard has already taken steps to improve the acoustics in classrooms. Rugs, or any soft, fluffy material, is great at absorbing sound. Instead of reflecting sound back into the room, rugs absorb the sound which decreases the amount of echo in a space. Most of Emma Willard School's classrooms have rugs to counteract the high ceilings and the echo effect that these high ceilings create. While this is a step in the right direction, it still is not enough. The rugs in most of the classrooms now are old and worn, making them flat and hard on the ground. When rugs become worn out, their sound absorbing qualities drastically decrease so in order for a rug to be an effective echo decreasing material, it cannot be thin and hard like the ones in the classrooms now.

In the next few months, I will be studying the effects that different materials have on the level of reverberation in a space. I will be studying how to improve current classrooms by adding materials and what materials work best for the job of eliminating echo and improving overall acoustics. Check back in the coming months for updates on my research!