Industries
Institutional and education acoustics
Speech carries most of its meaning in the consonants, and consonants are quiet, brief and high in frequency. In a reverberant room the vowels that precede them mask them. Students hear a voice, follow most of it, and lose enough of the words to lose part of the lesson without ever registering that they missed anything.
This is one of the best-researched relationships in building acoustics, and it applies across every space where the point of the room is that people understand each other: classrooms, lecture theatres and auditoria, seminar and collaboration space, libraries, teaching labs. Enormous care goes into how these buildings look, how they daylight and how they perform on energy. Whether the words arrive is decided by the same drawings, at the same stage, and it determines whether the building does the thing it was built for.
Our experience
The engineers at Bentham have worked as acoustical consultants on institutional and education projects across Canada, mostly on university and college campuses: academic and research buildings, business schools, teaching and research laboratories, lecture theatres and performance space, libraries and learning commons, student residences and athletic facilities, alongside elementary and secondary schools.
That runs from single classroom and office fit-outs through to major campus buildings, and from early planning and feasibility work through design, construction review and verification testing.
Much of it is the multi-programme building. One business school held an event space, faculty offices, a trading floor and a library in a single building in the middle of a campus. A college cultural hub combined performance halls, studios, teaching space and a mass timber residence tower in one development, which is a difficult set of neighbours to put in a single structure.
Campuses are rarely empty, and the work usually has to account for that. On one renovation, two floors were rebuilt directly above an art exhibition that stayed open to the public. That meant preconstruction testing to establish what the works could tolerate, limits set against it, and monitoring through construction so the contractor knew where the line was before crossing it rather than afterward.
Bentham Acoustics is new. Its engineers are not. The projects described here were carried out by Bentham engineers over their careers, at this firm and before it.
A full list of relevant project experience is available on request.
What we work on
Rooms where the words have to arrive.
Reverberation time and background sound level together decide how much of what is said is understood. Both are set by decisions about volume, geometry, finishes and mechanical systems that are made long before anyone asks an acoustics question.
Separation between rooms, not just treatment within them.
A well-treated lecture theatre still fails if the seminar room next door is audible through it. Distraction and disruption between adjacent teaching spaces is one of the most common complaints in a finished academic building, and it is set by the plan and the partition strategy rather than by anything that can be added afterward.
Buildings that do five things at once.
Academic buildings are increasingly funded from several sources at once, which means a single building holding classrooms, research labs, offices, collaboration space, and sometimes residence floors on top. Those functions have incompatible acoustic requirements and they end up stacked and adjacent. Resolving that programme, in plan and in section, is the most interesting work on these projects and the work with the most leverage.
Mechanical noise in teaching space.
Unit ventilators, rooftop units and displacement systems are the most common reason a finished building misses its background sound target, and the selection is usually driven by capacity, cost and energy performance alone.
The loud rooms and the quiet ones.
Gymnasiums, music and rehearsal rooms, shops, cafeterias and plant sit in the same building as reading rooms and classrooms. Where they are placed relative to each other does more than any partition specification will.
Building on an occupied campus.
Most institutional work happens beside buildings that are still teaching, examining and housing students. Construction noise and vibration management, and the scheduling around exam periods, is usually part of the scope.
Standards and requirements in Ontario
Education acoustics is governed less by code than by standards and by the requirements of the institution commissioning the building. The Ontario Building Code’s acoustic provisions are directed at dwelling units, which means student residences attract Code requirements while teaching space does not.
The reference standard is ANSI S12.60 for classroom acoustics, which sets background sound level and reverberation time criteria for learning space. Many universities and school boards incorporate it, or their own equivalent, into design standards that are contractual on the project. ASHRAE criteria apply to background sound levels from mechanical systems. Where a project pursues LEED, its acoustic performance credit includes requirements for learning space. Campus plant and rooftop equipment are also assessed as stationary sources under MECP publication NPC-300 where there are nearby residential receptors.