When the officials of the Lakeland Senior Games gathered in the Devon Room at the Bold Center to hand out gold, silver and bronze to the winners, they ran smack into the result of a design flaw built into the very walls of the Bold Center. Over a third of the room couldn’t hear the Emcee calling their names.
“People over by the door heard absolutely nothing,” said Anne Lemay, chairperson of the Lakeland Senior Games. “And on the other side, people said they heard an echo.”
The problem with the acoustics in the Devon Room is not a new one, but it is one that Lac La Biche County Council aims to fix.
“We’ve known for some time that a few of our facilities experience noise vibrations, so we secured the services of an acoustical consultant last December to test noise vibration levels and make suggestions for acoustical treatments,” said Shadia Amblie, spokesperson for the Lac La Biche County Council.
“We were contacted to see how we could settle the room down,” explained Corjan Buma, a noise control engineer. “You’ve got an elegant long meeting room with quite a lot of reverberation, and when there’s excessive reverberation, you’ll find there’s a real issue in getting proper speech intelligibility.”
Buma said that spoken words tend to linger in space, and when a room—like the Devon Room—is made with hard, sound reflective surfaces, like concrete, linoleum and glass, what has been spoken only milliseconds before interferes with what is being spoken in real time, and speech becomes garbled and hard to follow.
“When you get too many sound reflecting surfaces, you need to add sound absorbing surfaces into the space,” Buma said.
When the sound engineer came to Lac La Biche last December to perform his assessment, he did basic reverberation measurement, setting off short, controlled bursts of sound and measuring the speed of sound decay.
At the Bold Center, Buma was seeing reverberations over 5 seconds at the lower frequencies and 4 seconds at the higher frequencies, a situation he called “a recipe for disaster,” saying that the sound decay should be under 2 seconds for good speech intelligibility.
To remedy the problem, his recommendation was to fit the Devon Room with sound absorbing panels of varying thicknesses and lengths, and sound absorbing baffles under every second roof beam.
The council chamber at McArthur place was also tested and assessed, and will be fitted with acoustical treatments as well.
In total, remedying the acoustic problem at the Bold Center will cost the County $70,000.
The project has been tendered, and a contractor is presently building the acoustic panels. Installation will occur in September.
