Do you wonder what is the purpose of life? Regardless of your answer, you may not have wondered about the purpose of what is commonly known as a “bass trap”. As I shared the news of getting our technology patented, many got curious as to what that thing is doing. I was asked to “send the details”. Our company isn’t the best at marketing and creating brochures etc. so here is a blog instead which tries to explain what is it that the material does.
The tall white panel kept at the corner is what we got patented (and call it "Laconique")
I am going to let COVID 19 help me here. After the outbreak, everyone started wearing masks. What happened when meetings began again? I was presenting designs of an auditorium in front of 10-15 members in a decently large meeting room. I could sense that everyone was listening intently, but they were not able to hear properly. One of the members suggested with hand gestures that I lower the mask I was wearing. As soon as I did that, suddenly my speech was heard with much more clarity.
You don’t need to be an acoustician or a pro audio engineer to realize that speech becomes a lot clearer when you remove that facemask and talk. Besides restricting the movement of the mouth, the mask does one other thing. It blocks certain elements of speech (namely, consonants).
Here is how it looks (is heard) –
What the patented product does is, it removes this “mask”. Interestingly (and coincidentally), the technical term for this effect is also called masking.
When placed at the right place, “Laconique” absorbs only the low-frequency sound, reflecting back everything else. This removes the “mask”, and this is how it is heard –
To delve more into the science of it, take a look at this graph –
Credits to the above image are in this link
Notice that the vowels are lower in frequency and higher in decibels. This causes the masking effect when left untreated. But why does that reduce the clarity of speech?
To understand that, let me ask you to guess the following words –
1. T r _ _ t m _ n t
2. h _ g h _ r
3. w _ l c _ m _
4. _ _ i _ _
5. _ _ u _ _
6. _ _ a _ e _
I will be writing what these words are below, if you haven’t guessed and want to, don’t scroll below.
1. Treatment
2. higher
3. welcome
4. trick
5. trust
6. travel
You may have noticed that you correctly or almost correctly guessed the first three words. And I salute you if you were able to guess the last three words. In the first three words, all the vowels were blanked and in the last three words, all the consonants were blanked. Information of a word is contained in the consonants and the shape of the word is given by the vowels. Hence, the clarity increases when we remove the “mask”.
Now imagine all the places like classrooms, conference rooms, auditoriums, railway stations, airports that have poor speech clarity are lacking in this kind of absorption. This is where I want to work and I can use all the help that is needed.
You can connect with me in this space or write an email to my company using the following address - connect@consonanceacoustics.com and we can do something together!
Comments