Acoustics of Long Spaces: Theory and Design Guidance

Acoustics is a major concern in many long spaces, such as road or railway tunnels, underground/railway stations, corridors, concourses and urban streets. The specific problems of such irregularly shaped spaces, ranging from noise pollution in streets and tunnels to poor speech intelligibility of public address systems in railway stations are not dealt with by classic room acoustic theory. This state-of-the-art exposition of acoustics of long spaces presents the fundamentals of acoustic theory and calculation formulae for long spaces as well as giving guidelines for practical design with extensively illustrated work. A self contained book, it will prove an invaluable addition to this field as existing books deal mainly with regularly-shaped spaces. Beginning with a description of fundamental concepts, basic theories and modelling techniques relating to general room acoustics, the book moves on to theories and computer models for long spaces, including a method for predicting train noise in underground stations and an overall model for practical prediction. Design guidelines are presented with a large number of illustrations. Chapters on long enclosures and urban streets based on parametric studies using the theoretical/computer models, are followed by a description of a series of physical scale-model measurements on the effectiveness of strategic architectural acoustic treatments. The book concludes with a discussion of speech intelligibility in long enclosures based on a series of articulation tests including the differences in intelligibility between three different languages. Acoustics of Long Spaces will be essential reading for those involved with a large range of disciplines - architecture, urban planning, building services, civil engineering, environmental engineering, transport engineering, mechanical engineering and electrical engineering.Jian Kang is the author of 'Acoustics of Long Spaces: Theory and Design Guidance', published 2002 under ISBN 9780727730138 and ISBN 0727730134.