Acoustics Activity: Experiment with Sounds in Your Home
Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation | Apr 1, 2020
Frank Lloyd Wright’s designs often paid special attention to the acoustics—how a room or a space sounds. In this activity, we encourage you to try different noises and sounds in your home’s rooms and observe how different rooms absorb or reflect sound.
DIRECTIONS:
- Choose three rooms in your home.
- Write down each of your three rooms on a sheet of paper.
- List these descriptive sound choices below each room: Dull, Flat, Bright, Sparkling
(see example below) - Next, use your voice, an instrument, or a bell inside each room to hear how the acoustics sound throughout that space.
- Using one of the four descriptive word choices, circle the word that you think best describes what you are hearing in each room.
EXAMPLE:
Name of the Room _________________________________________
DULL FLAT BRIGHT SPARKLING
Photo of the Cabaret Theatre at Taliesin West by Andrew Pielage. Copyright Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation.
REFLECTION OR ABSORPTION OF SOUND?
Now think about the walls, floor, ceiling, and furniture you find in each room. Does a rug or carpeting absorb the sound? Does the glass or metal in a room reflect it?
On your activity sheet, put an ‘X’ in the box to show whether the walls, floor, ceiling, or furniture reflect or absorb sound. Add each side up. Write the number of ‘Xs’ from each column in the total section on your sheet. What is greater in each room, sound reflection or absorption?
Reminder! Do this for all three rooms to see which room has the most reflecting or absorbing materials in it!
