Acoustic Profiles – Dormitory Diffferences

by Matthew Voudouris – 30.9.26 – Architectural Acoustics

This study of acoustic profiles takes place in a WOKO student accommodation building in Zürich, Switzerland – where 160 exchange students reside. I will be examining two rooms: the communal kitchen and my personal dormitory, or bedroom.

Room 1 – Communal Kitchen Room 2 – Bedroom

To begin my study, the first space I analysed was the communal kitchen. In the entire building, there is only one, industrial-sized, kitchen. The building’s structure is exclusively concrete based, which in-turn informs the interior finish of the building as well in the polished concrete walls. The kitchen, while following the same structural logic, is clad almost completely in stainless steel, from the shelving to the appliances.

I find the kitchen interesting due to its slightly varied material composition from the rest of the building, where the reverberation, although everpresent, becomes more tinny in timbre, facilitating higher pitched, uncomfortable impact sounds.

Complementing this, during the time of sound mapping, was the constant cooking noise and refrigerator hum, which acted as background white noise framing the impulsive, higher pitched sounds.

When compared to the bedroom, however, you notice that the abundance of concrete gives the room a cavernous characteristic, despite its relatively small size. This is even further exaggerated upon opening the door, where one begins to recognise a degree of low frequency feedback, or echo, from the long concrete hallways.

I think a fundamental difference between the two rooms boils down to the ambient noise that is present. The kitchen contains refrigerators, cooking activity and exterior traffic noise through open windows, which remain constant throughout the duration of my data collection and gives the room an impression of openness. On the other hand, the isolation of the bedroom, combined with the strange juxtaposition of dense materiality but cavernous acoustic feel, gives the bedroom a claustrophobic quality and thus makes it more intimate.

Going forward, it would be interesting to hypothesise how these rooms in particular can be altered, using various acoustic interventions to achieve a more comfortable sound quality.