“So, what’s the big flanking deal?!”

A fitness studio likes to play loud, upbeat music. That’s what it takes to get the students to dance! But if a studio is sandwiched between a tile store and a post office in a commercial strip center, then, Houston, we have a problem. The adjacent business owners sure aren’t dancing: The pounding bass and yelling students do little to entertain their customers. So what can be done to improve the sound isolation?

In their paper, published in Sound&Vibration, Adam Young and Arno Bommer present three case studies (including the one mentioned above) that involved both modeling the sound transmission loss of a building partition and subsequent measurements in the field to determine the actual performance. Flanking paths and recommendations to improve the sound isolation are discussed for all three cases.