They’re putting it in the Freedom Tower. It occupies the niche between textured sprays and European-type plaster finishes that might sell for $35 a foot. Whereas this is $8 to $12 a foot.” And what exactly was SonaKrete? I asked. It was, he replied, an extremely smooth, “architecturally acceptable,” acoustical treatment that was “getting famous for doing custom, integral colors that soak right into the material.” It looked good to me, and I could just hear the commercial: “SonaKrete: The Krete That Made the Freedom Tower Fall Silent.”
I moved on to the Material Sciences Corporation. The written material I read on this company explained that “Whether it’s cars, dishwashers or computers, we live in a world where quiet equals quality in the minds of consumers.” Was that really true? There are stories about how, when quieter vacuum cleaners were introduced into the market, customers wouldn’t buy them because the sound suggested feeble suctioning power. “Put simply,” the promotional literature concluded, “at MSC we manufacture quiet.” While I tried to figure out how I felt about the idea ofmanufactured quiet, the booth team approached saying that they wanted to talk about Quiet Steel™ roofing. Quiet Steel has been a successful product for years now in the realm of automobile manufacture, where it’s described as one of the company’s “family” of NVH damping products. (NVH: noise, vibration, and harshness—I love the idea of getting rid of harshness along with noise and vibration. The reverse would be a QSC product. Something offering quiet, stillness,
and
compassion.) MSC’s booth displayed little steel plates hanging on chains from stick-and-post arrangements in the manner of Chinese gongs. The salesman explained that it was “basically laminated steel, two layers, with polymer in between.” It can be used, he said, “wherever there’s radiated noise. Automobiles. Washing machines. Driers. Vacuum cleaners. Now roofs as well!”
He gave me a little wooden hammer and invited me to strike an untreated steel plate, and then give a whack to Quiet Steel. I did. The first plate, of regular steel, made a nice, reverberating cymbal sound. Quiet Steel made just a little, discreet, dent-thud. I half expected the Quiet Steel plate to say “Excuse me” after its polite little sound emission. The vendor excitedly told me that he had a washing machine treated with Quiet Steel and had recently left coins in the pockets of his pants. “My wife could barely even hear them clattering around inside the machine!” he marveled.
The danger, of course, with such effective noise, vibration, and harshness damping is that you might not hear sounds signaling that you’re in the process of demolishing your product. At another point in the conference I heard about what happened when John Deere proudly introduced soundproof cabs into itsagricultural machinery to combat the very real problem of farmers suffering noise-induced hearing loss. The machines were a hit—until farmers realized that they could drive across an entire field in their air-conditioned, stereo-equipped cabs dumping engine parts without realizing anything was wrong until they’d totaled the machine. That put a damper on silence as a selling point for heavy farm equipment.
At the 3M booth, a big guy with a flat face and a loud bang of a voice told me that the hottest new thing in soundproofing was microperforated film. It’s a new film that has holes in it that you can “tune” for absorption, I was told, and should be commercially available for large-volume usage (“like carpeting all the systems under an automobile hood”) in the next couple of years. When I asked where microperforated film could go, I was told, “Where can’t it go might be a better question. It absorbs all sounds anywhere you put it. And you can print on it.” What exactly does it do? I asked.
He told me that while most sound absorbers today are fiber
I moved on to the Material Sciences Corporation. The written material I read on this company explained that “Whether it’s cars, dishwashers or computers, we live in a world where quiet equals quality in the minds of consumers.” Was that really true? There are stories about how, when quieter vacuum cleaners were introduced into the market, customers wouldn’t buy them because the sound suggested feeble suctioning power. “Put simply,” the promotional literature concluded, “at MSC we manufacture quiet.” While I tried to figure out how I felt about the idea ofmanufactured quiet, the booth team approached saying that they wanted to talk about Quiet Steel™ roofing. Quiet Steel has been a successful product for years now in the realm of automobile manufacture, where it’s described as one of the company’s “family” of NVH damping products. (NVH: noise, vibration, and harshness—I love the idea of getting rid of harshness along with noise and vibration. The reverse would be a QSC product. Something offering quiet, stillness,
and
compassion.) MSC’s booth displayed little steel plates hanging on chains from stick-and-post arrangements in the manner of Chinese gongs. The salesman explained that it was “basically laminated steel, two layers, with polymer in between.” It can be used, he said, “wherever there’s radiated noise. Automobiles. Washing machines. Driers. Vacuum cleaners. Now roofs as well!”
He gave me a little wooden hammer and invited me to strike an untreated steel plate, and then give a whack to Quiet Steel. I did. The first plate, of regular steel, made a nice, reverberating cymbal sound. Quiet Steel made just a little, discreet, dent-thud. I half expected the Quiet Steel plate to say “Excuse me” after its polite little sound emission. The vendor excitedly told me that he had a washing machine treated with Quiet Steel and had recently left coins in the pockets of his pants. “My wife could barely even hear them clattering around inside the machine!” he marveled.
The danger, of course, with such effective noise, vibration, and harshness damping is that you might not hear sounds signaling that you’re in the process of demolishing your product. At another point in the conference I heard about what happened when John Deere proudly introduced soundproof cabs into itsagricultural machinery to combat the very real problem of farmers suffering noise-induced hearing loss. The machines were a hit—until farmers realized that they could drive across an entire field in their air-conditioned, stereo-equipped cabs dumping engine parts without realizing anything was wrong until they’d totaled the machine. That put a damper on silence as a selling point for heavy farm equipment.
At the 3M booth, a big guy with a flat face and a loud bang of a voice told me that the hottest new thing in soundproofing was microperforated film. It’s a new film that has holes in it that you can “tune” for absorption, I was told, and should be commercially available for large-volume usage (“like carpeting all the systems under an automobile hood”) in the next couple of years. When I asked where microperforated film could go, I was told, “Where can’t it go might be a better question. It absorbs all sounds anywhere you put it. And you can print on it.” What exactly does it do? I asked.
He told me that while most sound absorbers today are fiber
Similar Books
