Learning Room Acoustics by Design: A Project-Based Experience

Optimizing room acoustics teaching for architects and building engineers is an unfinished business. Moreover, theoretical explanations about acoustic concepts hardly support the understanding of basic concepts of acoustics on these students. A basic BLA (Bipolar Laddering Assessment) experiment is presented with students showing that an active learning method can be accepted by them more easily when "sonification" is included in the course. This process, which converts data into non-speech audio to make acoustic concepts audible, is suggested as a possible solution for this problem. Additionally, the experiment indicates the basic guidelines for the improvement of a project-based pedagogy, which pretends to broaden architecture student's insight into acoustic problems.