May 10, 2021 • 36 mins
Whether it’s limiting interstate noise, preserving the serenity of nature or enhancing an orchestral performance, our acousticians are listening. On this episode of Speaking of Design, hear how their work involves everything from protecting patient privacy in hospitals to maintaining the ambiance of backyard barbeques to visiting polar bear habitat. Their mission is to enhance the sounds you want and help mitigate the ones you don’t.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:03):
I'm John Torek. And I'm Danny Sullivan. And
you're listening to Speaking of Design, bringing you
the stories of the engineers and architects who
are transforming the world one project at a
time.
(00:24):
From cars passing by on an eight lane
interstate
to the harmony of an orchestral performance
to the serenity of nature.
Sound is a huge part of the natural
and built world.
Today, we'll meet a team of acousticians whose
mission is enhancing the sounds you want
(00:48):
and mitigating the ones you don't.
I was not the greatest student in college.
(01:10):
At some point, the university asked me to
reconsider
my path in life, and I I wound
up going to a different school. That's Tim
Casey. Today, he's more than thirty years into
a successful career in acoustics at HDR.
After finding his academic footing and earning a
degree in biological sciences,
Tim began his career and later enrolled in
graduate level environmental engineering courses.
(01:33):
About the time that I had maxed out
the number of classes that I could take
without formally enrolling into it, I had a
chance to join a local band.
And so I joined the band and never
finished graduate school. But his career had taken
off, beginning when a transportation
project manager in HDR Chicago office was looking
to hire. He went to the office manager
(01:54):
and said, I need help. You know, have
you gotten any resumes lately? And Mike said,
oh, yeah. I got one right here. And
he reached into his garbage can and pulled
out my resume. The team was working on
the environmental impact statement for a new tollway,
and they had a project for Tim. To
help keep me busy, the people working on
the EIS
asked me
if I could learn how to use a
sound level meter, and I wound up going
(02:16):
out and doing traffic noise measurements, kinda complaint
based traffic noise measurements. An EIS outlines the
impact a proposed project will have on the
surrounding environment,
including changes in noise levels. They handed Tim
the manual and asked if he could see
himself performing the noise modeling
to predict sound levels for their report.
(02:36):
Soon, Tim found himself playing with an entirely
different set of instruments.
First, we had an analog sound level meter,
and that was the first tool I used.
And the FORTRAN
traffic noise model, FHWA's
original traffic noise model was called Stamina.
Fast forward three decades, and Tim has become
an industry expert who uses the most sophisticated
(02:58):
sound level meters and noise modeling software available.
As the firm's acoustic program manager,
he's based in Minneapolis
and oversees a team of nine across six
offices. Everyone except me either has a bachelor's
or a master's degree in acoustics or in
a branch of engineering with an emphasis on
acoustics.
(03:19):
As the group has grown, they've taken on
specialized areas of expertise. In the broadest sense,
HDR's acoustics program can kind of be subdivided
into three different buckets.
There's the architectural acoustics bucket, there's the traffic
noise bucket, and there's the everything else bucket.
These days, Tim finds himself in the everything
else bucket, which can include environmental noise monitoring
(03:43):
for wind farms,
combustion turbines,
hydroelectric dams, and industrial facilities.
The work has taken Tim to some interesting
locations,
including a boxing ring.
I did a noise analysis for a proposed
landfill
in the Southern half of Puerto Rico and
had to go there and and testify through
(04:05):
an interpreter in a public hearing that was
held in an outdoor boxing arena.
I was assigned to do fairly screening level
air quality
analysis and noise analysis to evaluate noise from
the vehicles coming and going from the site
collection vehicles, bringing trash to the site. There
were public meetings, and noise was one of
the issues of concern for the stakeholders. And
(04:27):
the lawyers for the opposition
asked that the person who did the air
and the noise analysis be present at the
hearing. Outside of work, Tim fronts his own
band, Tim KC and the Martyrs, which has
helped his career, but not in the way
that you'd think. When I first started fronting
my own band and and performing songs, I
would feel so much anxiety that I my
(04:49):
shirt would be soaking wet by the end
of a forty five minute performance out of
pure anxiety.
My shirts were literally dripping wet. And over
time, my shirts became drier and drier. And
right around that time, I started having to
do expert witness testimony on wind turbine projects,
and that was exceptionally stressful.
But having the experience of being completely vulnerable
(05:11):
on stage writing something as intensely personal as
a song
allowed me to sit in the witness stand
and withstand
every attempt to, you know, try to make
me trip over my words
or try to intimidate me. Tim's resume even
includes a project that involves travel to space.
It was at a regional airport
(05:31):
outside of Denver, and whoever owned that regional
airport teamed up with one of the few
rocket manufacturer,
Hopefuls,
interested in developing
commercial
space travel.
The operational plan was to take somebody up
into outer space and bring them right back
down. So it was it was kind of
an adventure ride. His team wrote the rocket
(05:52):
launch noise model for the proposed spaceport,
which Tim notes was the first three d
GIS rocket launch noise model approved by the
Federal Aviation Administration.
Another project involved traveling to Point Thompson on
the Northern Coast Of Alaska. There, an energy
client was seeking permission to build directional drilling
(06:12):
platforms
to extract liquid natural gas and crude oil
from an enormous reserve beneath the Beaufort Sea.
As part of the EIS for the state
of Alaska,
Tim and his team ventured north to conduct
a noise analysis on the potential impact on
fish and wildlife.
The first thing we did on that project
was to go up there and take Arctic
(06:32):
winter survival training because the the initial plan
was we're gonna look at maps and select
preliminary noise measurement locations, and then we're gonna
fly out to those locations with a helicopter.
But inherent in that plan was the the
idea that weather changes really quickly out there.
So the helicopter is gonna be able to
fly you somewhere, but it may not be
able to take off. So we're gonna give
(06:53):
you this bag, and this bag has an
Arctic survival suit, a tent, and an Arctic
rated sleeping bag. We'll give you a deck
of cards and a couple candy bars too.
And, hopefully, we can come back and get
you in the morning, but you might have
to spend a night in a tent in
polar bear habitat during polar bears' ending season.
The polar bear concern was not purely hypothetical.
(07:13):
And as funny as that sounds,
one of the weekends I was up there
in the wintertime, they let me go down
to Anchorage for a weekend.
And
that weekend, a bear wandered into dead horse
and grabbed one of the musk oxens
from the herd of musk oxen that walks
around in dead horse and spent the weekend
(07:34):
eating it behind one of the buildings.
So the the whole polar bear thing was
a very tangible
safety concern. They quickly realized the helicopters would
be impractical to deploy their huge noise monitoring
stations.
So then the next day, they loaded us
into a school bus,
and they drove us 40 miles over a
road that was literally made out of ice
(07:55):
cubes
over the frozen tundra
out to the drilling platform.
So we did deploy
the four custom made noise monitoring systems, these
big four by four by four aluminum cubes
with two foot by four foot solar panels
on them. We loaded them up onto two
snow cats
and drove them off of the temporary drilling
(08:17):
platform
out into the vast
winter Arctic soundscape with the North Slope. With
one of the monitoring systems deployed in a
precarious position. We drove straight north off the
coast of Alaska over the frozen Beaufort Sea
onto a sandbar,
And it really was just a it was
just a stand a sandbar that protruded just
a little bit above the snow and the
(08:37):
ice. And we were on that sandbar because
the sandbar next to us was taller,
and it was tall enough that snow could
could accumulate on the downwind side of it,
and that was polar bear habitat. We were
in polar bear denning habitat during polar bear
season. The team recorded for more than twenty
five days,
then returned home to Minneapolis
(08:59):
to analyze the data. Gina Jarda, at the
time a junior member of Tim's team, began
listening to hours and hours of Arctic recordings.
Well, it's creepy. So it's totally creepy. There
was a month of my life
as a young person
that I listened to audio from the North
Slope Of Alaska every day.
(09:20):
I was the youngest person in group at
the time and so some days, I listened
to what felt like nothing and I had
to continue to check my audio. Like, is
it still on? Because there was nothing.
Then one day, I I wanna say it
was, like, 06:00 at night in Minnesota at
(09:42):
at that time of year. It was dark,
and I just hear a crackle in my
ear. And I'm like, that is so strange.
And then the clip ended because we did
randomized sampling.
So we didn't listen to everything. You'd listen
to random samples. So I searched for an
hour because I was like, I need to
know what this crackle is.
(10:29):
And I went back. I found it. And
the reason it feels so chilling is because
it's a a polar bear
physically chewing on the microphone windscreen.
He's chewing on the screen is what you're
hearing, and that's why it feels so up
close.
And eve and e and even creepier listening
to it over headphones in a almost deserted
(10:50):
office at night
That was how that was discovered. It's probably
one of my favorite audio clips. Gina's work
in the field has taken her to both
the northern and southernmost points in The United
States and as far away as Djibouti.
(11:17):
I just had the most amazing adventures out
in the field.
In California,
I got to do a wind project,
that took me on to BLM lands,
and we got to hike with backpacks
for miles in order to place sound level
meters right on property lines. And it was
just amazing.
(11:38):
In one direction, you would see
desert
for miles and as far as you could
see. And then behind me, I was sitting
in snow and mountain,
and it was it was gorgeous.
Another project involved precious metals,
a suitcase,
and dynamite.
We were building a bridge to go over
an active mine and analyzing
(12:01):
what kind of vibrational forces
the the bridge needed to be designed to.
And there's really well known classifications,
right, for bridge design and seismic activity, but
this is blasting activity. And so for a
few months, they got to measure blasting and
record it via GoPro and via Gia Phone
(12:22):
for vibration.
And I got to analyze how the vibration
through the rock and how far the rock
throw went via GoPro. I remember one day
I set up my rig, and I was
just waiting in a clear area for the
blast to go off. And then someone set
down a a suitcase next to me, a
heavy looking suitcase, and I heard a thud.
And I just looked
(12:44):
I looked next to me, and I realized
it was the detonator. As Gina's advanced in
her career, she's gravitated toward a specialty that
relates to her dream as a child.
When I was pursuing my associates in music
performance,
I really thought that I was gonna go
(13:06):
out and be a rock star. Growing up,
I was heavily involved in the arts and
performing arts
and was part of a production company probably
starting at the age of
16. Gina spent many hours in different types
of performance halls
where she took note of how different instruments
(13:26):
sounded in different spaces.
That eventually led to studying acoustics.
I've always had
a strength in
math and really loved built spaces that I
performed in. It became a love of myself
performing
and really the art of performance
and then evolved into,
(13:48):
well, how does what goes behind that performance?
She now leads the architectural acoustics practice at
HDR,
which can include health care facilities,
data centers, industrial buildings, classroom settings, and correctional
facilities.
Gina said one of the first things to
consider with acoustics inside a building is what
might be creating noise outside the facility. On
(14:10):
the architectural acoustic side, we can be brought
on to a project very early on in
the planning stages.
So we would discuss site evaluations,
how this site may impact the acoustics, whether
that be potentially high noise environment.
Right? Is it near an airport
(14:30):
or a highway? Is it near a freight
rail line that has vibration?
Then her team begins looking at how the
space inside the facility will be used and
what will impact acoustics.
Space planning and planning for appropriate adjacencies
is going to be a number one. If
you don't have a loud space next to
(14:50):
a quiet space, then there wouldn't be a
need for a high sound isolation system necessarily.
And that doesn't just go for room functions.
That also applies
to the layout when you're talking about where
do my mechanical units on the roof sit.
Right? Is it over
space that's noise sensitive, or are my duct
(15:11):
mains dropping over a space that needs lower
noise levels? The acousticians
work with other specialists
as the project moves from overall space planning
into more detailed design. And so we work
with building owners and users,
architects,
interior designers, and structural engineers, mechanical engineers,
(15:33):
then as the design of the facility progresses
to help inform that design.
And so in later phases, we actually do
quantitative analysis
of the mechanical systems to calculate
the noise
into a space, the vibration
impacting a space or coming out of a
space, analyzing the finishes and how that impacts
(15:55):
communications
and reverberation,
and then looking at the sound isolation systems
of the interior
partitions and exterior envelope. Gina's group uses a
number of modeling programs to predict how a
space will sound.
Often, clients want more than just a written
report to convey the results.
It's often difficult to
(16:17):
interpret
what words
mean in terms of it is 30 decibels
in this space and how does that translate
to the actual oral environment?
So we supplement
that type of reporting, written reporting, and measurement
with auralizations
and audio examples of what a space might
(16:37):
sound like or how systems are impacting
the the acoustics of a space. Using specialized
software that can input a number of factors
to produce samples
of how a space might sound, which is
called auralization.
Most often,
we are doing those simulations using the EASE
software
and modifying
(16:58):
the finishes of the space, showing different examples
of how adding more or less acoustic treatment
or in acoustic treatment
in different locations,
how that would impact the acoustics of a
space. For example, within a performance space, an
acoustician
might take raw audio of a voice
Sound.
(17:19):
And simulate how it would sound from the
right side of the main floor of the
performance hall they're designing.
Sound.
Versus the sound on the left side of
the balcony.
Sound.
Or how raw audio of an instrument sounds.
And simulate that from the front row.
(17:44):
And then the nosebleed seats.
Spaces like that can involve some pretty interesting
clients. There was a recent design in the
past five years
that we did for the Walter Reed Medical
Center, and it included an auditorium.
And that auditorium
(18:05):
will be used for both broadcast
functions and live functions, and it's my understanding
that the president will often speak from the
auditorium. However, when you're designing a hospital,
the acoustical goals are entirely different. An example
of that could be looking at a patient
room in a health care project, something like
(18:27):
that. We would be looking at
noise control
to provide a space that is calm
and healing, where someone can rest.
In addition to that, we're thinking about intelligible
communication.
Maybe there's messages being shared there or speech
that's being shared there that needs to be
heard very clearly in that patient room. So
(18:49):
the challenge becomes achieving intelligibility
within the room, but privacy from ears outside
the room. And then another consideration
in that space would be, well, while I
want someone who is in that room to
very clearly hear what's being communicated.
I don't want the people outside of that
room
(19:10):
to hear what's being communicated. So it's also
isolating that room from the adjacent spaces. Depending
on the purpose of a room, a simulation
might compare raw audio of someone speaking. Dyloxetine.
Loxetine.
Versus someone speaking with background conversation in the
space.
Dyloxetine.
(19:30):
Loxetine.
Versus someone speaking with background noise and reverberation.
Diloxetine.
Diloxetine.
As health care providers imagine new types of
spaces to promote healing,
it can start to blend the acoustical considerations
of different types of buildings. I have had
(19:50):
medical facilities that have a lot of mixed
use.
One example of that is the think whole
person
project in the Omaha area.
There was a theater
where
videos would be played. There was a large
six story atrium space that had multiple functions,
patients moving through it as they were going
(20:12):
to their provider spaces,
had a cafe,
and then also had the desire to have
live performance
and had a a permanent piano
situated in it. And all of those functions
were open to the atrium,
which was adjacent to the provider spaces. So
it was a very interesting mix of both
(20:33):
performance
type space
and medical.
Office buildings and especially open offices or public
spaces
present their own considerations.
In the context
of
sound masking systems and how they're used in
design,
they're typically not going to be just white
noise. They're actually
specific spectrums
(20:54):
and tuned
to provide more energy in certain frequencies than
others, to provide more masking performance.
We'll often see those utilized
in health care applications,
in commercial building
applications, in offices,
And the function of those systems is to
increase privacy
(21:15):
either in open plan spaces or closed plan
spaces
by introducing,
more background sound. That type of system can
provide more privacy in an open space, but
also provides a subliminal comfort. As an acoustician,
there's a couple of things that are really
difficult.
And one is to walk into,
(21:36):
your open office and the sound masking is
off because you are the first person to
know, and it it drives me insane.
The third area of the acoustics team focuses
on traffic noise analysis work where Tim Casey
(21:59):
began his career.
My father was a electrical engineer at ENSF
for most of my childhood, and I was
around that field. I was around the rail
(22:19):
yards. I was able to see other things
besides the electrical engineering part of it and
was really intrigued and interested in the
environmental aspect of engineering.
That's Mike Parsons, a traffic noise analysis practice
manager in HDR's Denver office. Mukul Pal,
one of Mike's counterparts in Vienna, Virginia, experienced
a similar family inertia into the world of
(22:41):
engineering
while growing up nearly 8,000 miles across the
globe. I come from a family of engineers.
My dad, my uncles,
even my sister,
my cousin brothers. I mean, in India, it's
a saying, right, that either you
would be an engineer or a doctor when
you grow up. So
I kind of had,
(23:02):
no choice up in the beginning. But just
like Mike's, father, my dad is also an
electrical engineer. Muckel started his career as a
civil engineer.
Much like his boss, Tim Casey,
he ventured into traffic noise analysis through an
EIS project in Chicago.
During his early projects, he met Mike, and
they bonded over their similar backgrounds,
(23:23):
which included a love of sports. As I
got into my college career, I went to
a division three school with the hopes of
playing basketball,
and the school did not have an engineering
program. So after my first year, I started
thinking that
it wasn't really where I saw my future.
And then after my second year, I was
sure I was interested in doing engineering work.
(23:43):
Meanwhile, Mookal was raised playing entirely different sports.
I was a very good cricket player. I
I'm still a good cricket player, but
I represented
my college
teams for badminton,
cricket, and a lot of table tennis, volleyball,
squash. I mean, lots of games. Mike began
as an air quality engineer where he also
(24:03):
found himself working EIS reports.
So he began cracking open textbooks,
staying up until midnight, and taught himself about
traffic noise analysis on the job. There are
state and federal regulations that determine when a
traffic noise analysis has to be done, and
they have different types. And the type that
drive these analysis is called a type one
(24:24):
project. So that would be the addition of
a traffic lane, a substantial change in vertical
or horizontal alignment,
and requirements like that. When a project has
those requirements,
by law, we have to do a traffic
noise analysis.
So when you do that analysis, you predict
whether the results you come up with will
(24:44):
meet state and federal regulations.
If they do, great. If not, then you
have to design
traffic noise abatement to help meet the requirements
each state lays out. The first step of
noise analysis
involves identifying the noise receptors in the project
area, the noise sensitive location such as people's
backyards or a restaurant patio.
(25:05):
So once the project
initiates
and lands on our desk, just like a
normal
roadway improvement project,
adding a new lane or we are building
a highway on a a new alignment,
we just take that study area and we
determine various locations where we have to go
(25:26):
and do some field noise monitoring.
Then we just take what we call ANSI
nineteen eighty three type one or type two
noise meters,
and we deploy them in the field and
do some, quick half an hour, twenty minute
measurements on various different sites throughout the corridor
to get a good sampling of what the
ambient noise is in the corridor. From there,
(25:49):
they get to work predicting how the noise
levels would change after the project is built
using software mandated by the Federal Highway Administration.
Then we bring back and we basically replicate
the existing conditions
in the traffic noise model
PNM, and we take all the roadway design
information and all that stuff with the existing
(26:11):
conditions and code it in the traffic noise
model. Then we put the traffic in there
as well, and we go traffic speeds
and all the grade features, some ground zones,
some
trees.
And we try to replicate whatever is in
the field,
and then we let the noise model do
its magic and predict the noise.
(26:32):
Because traffic noise fluctuates,
the measurements are averaged to determine a baseline
sound level. In traffic noise, we use the
LAQ, which is equivalent continuous sound pressure level,
which you can describe it as the average
noise over a given period of time, which
is an hour in traffic noise. So what
we're comparing our predictions against is an hourly
(26:55):
average noise level. Well, you or I might
not think about measuring sound beyond adjusting the
volume on your smartphone or TV,
Mookal and Mike described how sound level relates
to traffic noise.
Fun fact about traffic noise levels
is the sound levels additions
are based on the grid wake units.
(27:15):
So if you add two fifty decibel sound
levels together, it's not gonna give you a
hundred decibels. It's gonna give you 53 decibels.
It's tough to explain
when, you know, another way to look at
it too is, like,
it if you double traffic, it only raises
noise levels three decibels, which is just barely
perceptible to the human ear. Unlike Gina's simulations,
(27:39):
the reports they produce don't usually include audio.
They're filled with regulations and data from their
noise measurements,
often depicted using GIS
to provide a more appealing
visual communication of the results on a map.
And if those are within a threshold of
three decibels, which is
the normal rates that a human ear can
(27:59):
perceive.
Any change less than three decibels,
the human ears, believe it or not, Danny,
does not perceive
the change. So anything above three decibels is
what it perceives. And then we just take
the model and do the build conditions. And
based on our general NEPA process, we predict
noise in the next twenty years, and there
(28:20):
are federal guidelines of what the noise levels
have to be. When the new roadway is
expected to exceed state abatement noise criteria
or significantly increase noise levels by perhaps 10
to 15 decibels, for example,
that's when the state DOT needs to investigate
an abatement option and get public input. For
the most part, the solution just comes down
(28:42):
to the size of the sound barrier
in the form of a wall alongside the
interstate. There are other options
that are considered, but usually none of them
really have any kind of staying power. For
instance, with trees or vegetation, you have to
have at least a hundred feet
of dense
trees or vegetation that are present year round.
So that often is not the case in
(29:04):
any of these project areas to provide any
kind of noise reduction.
A A lot of times, there's been a
lot of studies that show those
are they provide psychological benefit. If you can't
see it, you don't get bugged and bothered
by it as much. Other options are berms,
which while they work great, they often need
a bigger footprint than a noise barrier. So
those often aren't included in projects.
(29:26):
You can create a buffer. So there's there's
things like that. While they're looked at and
examined,
more often than not, they're not included in
a project just due to space and footprint
requirements.
Occasionally, a project might introduce some other variables
into the equation, including one that brought Mike
back to his days tagging along with his
father at the rail yard.
(29:49):
I worked on a cool one over the
years. It was the BNSF BNSF Railway Logistics
Park in Kansas City. It was a brand
new facility they were building. And, there was
a lot of different aspects that went into
this project. It had not only the rail
line going in and out of this facility,
but at the facility itself, it had big
overhead cranes because this facility was bringing in
(30:10):
these rail cars with with a cargo on
it that they would have to take off,
and then they'd load that onto semis,
and they'd bring that to a logistics
park and warehouse facility. Which included many more
sources of sound than a six lane interstate.
So I had to predict noise from not
only the trains, but the stationary and mobile
equipment on the ground like the trains and
the forklifts.
(30:31):
And then we had noise from the the
semi trucks going in and out of the
warehouse
and a bunch of different aspects
that were creating noise and vibration for the
receptors around the area. And, they were also
building a new interchange as part of that
project. While the Federal Highway Administration
and State Departments of Transportation
govern roadway traffic noise,
(30:52):
the Federal Railroad Administration
and Federal Transit Administration
have their own regulations for rail noise.
This project fell somewhere in between. And there's
not a lot of clear cut noise regulations
that go along with a project like that.
So when we do these traffic noise analyses,
it's pretty straightforward with, you know, each state
has their own regs. You gotta follow it.
(31:13):
But here, it was gonna get reviewed by
the Kansas DOT,
and I had all these different aspects and
noise sources that were going into it. So
I had to put together a plan
and different regulations
to follow and present that and get the
DOT's buy off on it. And, ultimately,
when we presented it to them, they bought
off on it, and we did this analysis
(31:33):
with all these different noise sources in the
project area.
Sometimes the type of project is straightforward, but
the mere size of the project makes it
more memorable.
One of the most recent projects that I
did in North Carolina,
it's a design build project about seven miles
long, six lanes in each direction, and lots
of receptors. And and, interestingly,
(31:56):
analysis to be done on that project with
keeping up with the design changes and things
like that. In the end, we ended up
with 24,000
linear feet of noise barriers that constitute about
425,000
square feet. So quite a massive project.
With projects that size, finding alternative solutions to
noise barriers can save millions of dollars.
(32:18):
Mike mentioned one such project. There was a
big design build analysis in Minnesota
on T H 212, and they were really
expanding
the existing highway from a two lane road
to a four lane controlled access highway on
new alignment. So it was kind of cutting
through all these neighborhoods, but there was enough
space. So when they did their preliminary
design, they had noise walls
(32:40):
everywhere throughout this project. But back then, they
let me really help and guide the design
a lot on eliminating these noise walls. So
we're able to change the grade and go
down further. We're able to use a lot
of the extra soil when they reduce the
grade
to use as berms. And I was able
to model these berms
and really save millions in potential noise barrier
(33:01):
costs. So that was kind of a fun
one. Though you may not see them, one
of the latest innovations in traffic noise abatement
is the introduction of clear walls. There are
clear walls now. I think it's up in
Wisconsin, if I'm not wrong. They have used
a special
material
from plastic, which is clear. So from the
driver's perspective, you are just driving and you
(33:23):
won't realize
that there is a wall unless there is
a reflection of any of that sort. Spaces
I've seen those walls are on
really beautiful environmental spaces. Like, there's a bay
in Florida where they're been used, and they
wanted the people coming you know, the walls
went under the bridge and off the bridge,
and they wanted the people to be able
to see the water still and enjoy the
water there. And more so, you know, everywhere
(33:46):
I've seen them, they're not to block the
pristine view of the environment that people have.
If you study traffic noise for a living,
then, yes, you also begin to take note
of it when you're not working. Oh, absolutely.
You know, you you constantly
are are,
you know, judging some of the levels, of
course. Nowadays, even
(34:06):
there are these apps,
that you can download on your phone
to get an average
noise levels wherever you,
want to measure. As Mike reminds us, no
matter the profession,
isn't that something that everyone does? I mean,
I'll tell you what. I grew up with
an electrical engineer father who would always point
out power lines,
(34:26):
and I'm married to a dentist who always
or not always, but occasionally points out things
about people's smiles or teeth. So
I'm always like, why would you do that?
But now I always find myself looking at
noise walls, especially ones that have, like, some
cool aesthetic treatments. Right? Then I find myself
noticing that everywhere I go. Like, oh, that's
a ugly noise. Well, that's a pretty noise.
(34:47):
Well,
yeah. You know, my young self would be
disappointed in my old self, but, you know,
here you are. And once again, Mookle is
finding the apple doesn't fall far from the
tree. The kid who is six years old,
of course, you know, that's the age. He's
always inquisitive. Right? So you're driving and he
is he has come to know, like, you
know, what, dad does. And
(35:10):
he is constantly pointing.
Papa, that's the wall that you built. Right?
So I'm like, oh my god.
For more information,
visit hdrinc.com/speakingofdesign.
(35:31):
You'll find pictures,
bios of our guests, and links to related
articles. And be sure to subscribe and drop
us a review on your favorite podcast app.
Thanks for listening. Special thanks to Tim Casey
for lending us his music for this episode.
You'll find more from Tim Casey and the
Martyrs anywhere that you find music online.
Additional thanks to Amanda Weiss.
I'm John Torek. And I'm Danny Sullivan. And
you're listening to Speaking of Design, bringing you
the stories of the engineers and architects who
are transforming the world one project at a
time.
(00:24):
From cars passing by on an eight lane
interstate
to the harmony of an orchestral performance
to the serenity of nature.
Sound is a huge part of the natural
and built world.
Today, we'll meet a team of acousticians whose
mission is enhancing the sounds you want
(00:48):
and mitigating the ones you don't.
I was not the greatest student in college.
(01:10):
At some point, the university asked me to
reconsider
my path in life, and I I wound
up going to a different school. That's Tim
Casey. Today, he's more than thirty years into
a successful career in acoustics at HDR.
After finding his academic footing and earning a
degree in biological sciences,
Tim began his career and later enrolled in
graduate level environmental engineering courses.
(01:33):
About the time that I had maxed out
the number of classes that I could take
without formally enrolling into it, I had a
chance to join a local band.
And so I joined the band and never
finished graduate school. But his career had taken
off, beginning when a transportation
project manager in HDR Chicago office was looking
to hire. He went to the office manager
(01:54):
and said, I need help. You know, have
you gotten any resumes lately? And Mike said,
oh, yeah. I got one right here. And
he reached into his garbage can and pulled
out my resume. The team was working on
the environmental impact statement for a new tollway,
and they had a project for Tim. To
help keep me busy, the people working on
the EIS
asked me
if I could learn how to use a
sound level meter, and I wound up going
(02:16):
out and doing traffic noise measurements, kinda complaint
based traffic noise measurements. An EIS outlines the
impact a proposed project will have on the
surrounding environment,
including changes in noise levels. They handed Tim
the manual and asked if he could see
himself performing the noise modeling
to predict sound levels for their report.
(02:36):
Soon, Tim found himself playing with an entirely
different set of instruments.
First, we had an analog sound level meter,
and that was the first tool I used.
And the FORTRAN
traffic noise model, FHWA's
original traffic noise model was called Stamina.
Fast forward three decades, and Tim has become
an industry expert who uses the most sophisticated
(02:58):
sound level meters and noise modeling software available.
As the firm's acoustic program manager,
he's based in Minneapolis
and oversees a team of nine across six
offices. Everyone except me either has a bachelor's
or a master's degree in acoustics or in
a branch of engineering with an emphasis on
acoustics.
(03:19):
As the group has grown, they've taken on
specialized areas of expertise. In the broadest sense,
HDR's acoustics program can kind of be subdivided
into three different buckets.
There's the architectural acoustics bucket, there's the traffic
noise bucket, and there's the everything else bucket.
These days, Tim finds himself in the everything
else bucket, which can include environmental noise monitoring
(03:43):
for wind farms,
combustion turbines,
hydroelectric dams, and industrial facilities.
The work has taken Tim to some interesting
locations,
including a boxing ring.
I did a noise analysis for a proposed
landfill
in the Southern half of Puerto Rico and
had to go there and and testify through
(04:05):
an interpreter in a public hearing that was
held in an outdoor boxing arena.
I was assigned to do fairly screening level
air quality
analysis and noise analysis to evaluate noise from
the vehicles coming and going from the site
collection vehicles, bringing trash to the site. There
were public meetings, and noise was one of
the issues of concern for the stakeholders. And
(04:27):
the lawyers for the opposition
asked that the person who did the air
and the noise analysis be present at the
hearing. Outside of work, Tim fronts his own
band, Tim KC and the Martyrs, which has
helped his career, but not in the way
that you'd think. When I first started fronting
my own band and and performing songs, I
would feel so much anxiety that I my
(04:49):
shirt would be soaking wet by the end
of a forty five minute performance out of
pure anxiety.
My shirts were literally dripping wet. And over
time, my shirts became drier and drier. And
right around that time, I started having to
do expert witness testimony on wind turbine projects,
and that was exceptionally stressful.
But having the experience of being completely vulnerable
(05:11):
on stage writing something as intensely personal as
a song
allowed me to sit in the witness stand
and withstand
every attempt to, you know, try to make
me trip over my words
or try to intimidate me. Tim's resume even
includes a project that involves travel to space.
It was at a regional airport
(05:31):
outside of Denver, and whoever owned that regional
airport teamed up with one of the few
rocket manufacturer,
Hopefuls,
interested in developing
commercial
space travel.
The operational plan was to take somebody up
into outer space and bring them right back
down. So it was it was kind of
an adventure ride. His team wrote the rocket
(05:52):
launch noise model for the proposed spaceport,
which Tim notes was the first three d
GIS rocket launch noise model approved by the
Federal Aviation Administration.
Another project involved traveling to Point Thompson on
the Northern Coast Of Alaska. There, an energy
client was seeking permission to build directional drilling
(06:12):
platforms
to extract liquid natural gas and crude oil
from an enormous reserve beneath the Beaufort Sea.
As part of the EIS for the state
of Alaska,
Tim and his team ventured north to conduct
a noise analysis on the potential impact on
fish and wildlife.
The first thing we did on that project
was to go up there and take Arctic
(06:32):
winter survival training because the the initial plan
was we're gonna look at maps and select
preliminary noise measurement locations, and then we're gonna
fly out to those locations with a helicopter.
But inherent in that plan was the the
idea that weather changes really quickly out there.
So the helicopter is gonna be able to
fly you somewhere, but it may not be
able to take off. So we're gonna give
(06:53):
you this bag, and this bag has an
Arctic survival suit, a tent, and an Arctic
rated sleeping bag. We'll give you a deck
of cards and a couple candy bars too.
And, hopefully, we can come back and get
you in the morning, but you might have
to spend a night in a tent in
polar bear habitat during polar bears' ending season.
The polar bear concern was not purely hypothetical.
(07:13):
And as funny as that sounds,
one of the weekends I was up there
in the wintertime, they let me go down
to Anchorage for a weekend.
And
that weekend, a bear wandered into dead horse
and grabbed one of the musk oxens
from the herd of musk oxen that walks
around in dead horse and spent the weekend
(07:34):
eating it behind one of the buildings.
So the the whole polar bear thing was
a very tangible
safety concern. They quickly realized the helicopters would
be impractical to deploy their huge noise monitoring
stations.
So then the next day, they loaded us
into a school bus,
and they drove us 40 miles over a
road that was literally made out of ice
(07:55):
cubes
over the frozen tundra
out to the drilling platform.
So we did deploy
the four custom made noise monitoring systems, these
big four by four by four aluminum cubes
with two foot by four foot solar panels
on them. We loaded them up onto two
snow cats
and drove them off of the temporary drilling
(08:17):
platform
out into the vast
winter Arctic soundscape with the North Slope. With
one of the monitoring systems deployed in a
precarious position. We drove straight north off the
coast of Alaska over the frozen Beaufort Sea
onto a sandbar,
And it really was just a it was
just a stand a sandbar that protruded just
a little bit above the snow and the
(08:37):
ice. And we were on that sandbar because
the sandbar next to us was taller,
and it was tall enough that snow could
could accumulate on the downwind side of it,
and that was polar bear habitat. We were
in polar bear denning habitat during polar bear
season. The team recorded for more than twenty
five days,
then returned home to Minneapolis
(08:59):
to analyze the data. Gina Jarda, at the
time a junior member of Tim's team, began
listening to hours and hours of Arctic recordings.
Well, it's creepy. So it's totally creepy. There
was a month of my life
as a young person
that I listened to audio from the North
Slope Of Alaska every day.
(09:20):
I was the youngest person in group at
the time and so some days, I listened
to what felt like nothing and I had
to continue to check my audio. Like, is
it still on? Because there was nothing.
Then one day, I I wanna say it
was, like, 06:00 at night in Minnesota at
(09:42):
at that time of year. It was dark,
and I just hear a crackle in my
ear. And I'm like, that is so strange.
And then the clip ended because we did
randomized sampling.
So we didn't listen to everything. You'd listen
to random samples. So I searched for an
hour because I was like, I need to
know what this crackle is.
(10:29):
And I went back. I found it. And
the reason it feels so chilling is because
it's a a polar bear
physically chewing on the microphone windscreen.
He's chewing on the screen is what you're
hearing, and that's why it feels so up
close.
And eve and e and even creepier listening
to it over headphones in a almost deserted
(10:50):
office at night
That was how that was discovered. It's probably
one of my favorite audio clips. Gina's work
in the field has taken her to both
the northern and southernmost points in The United
States and as far away as Djibouti.
(11:17):
I just had the most amazing adventures out
in the field.
In California,
I got to do a wind project,
that took me on to BLM lands,
and we got to hike with backpacks
for miles in order to place sound level
meters right on property lines. And it was
just amazing.
(11:38):
In one direction, you would see
desert
for miles and as far as you could
see. And then behind me, I was sitting
in snow and mountain,
and it was it was gorgeous.
Another project involved precious metals,
a suitcase,
and dynamite.
We were building a bridge to go over
an active mine and analyzing
(12:01):
what kind of vibrational forces
the the bridge needed to be designed to.
And there's really well known classifications,
right, for bridge design and seismic activity, but
this is blasting activity. And so for a
few months, they got to measure blasting and
record it via GoPro and via Gia Phone
(12:22):
for vibration.
And I got to analyze how the vibration
through the rock and how far the rock
throw went via GoPro. I remember one day
I set up my rig, and I was
just waiting in a clear area for the
blast to go off. And then someone set
down a a suitcase next to me, a
heavy looking suitcase, and I heard a thud.
And I just looked
(12:44):
I looked next to me, and I realized
it was the detonator. As Gina's advanced in
her career, she's gravitated toward a specialty that
relates to her dream as a child.
When I was pursuing my associates in music
performance,
I really thought that I was gonna go
(13:06):
out and be a rock star. Growing up,
I was heavily involved in the arts and
performing arts
and was part of a production company probably
starting at the age of
16. Gina spent many hours in different types
of performance halls
where she took note of how different instruments
(13:26):
sounded in different spaces.
That eventually led to studying acoustics.
I've always had
a strength in
math and really loved built spaces that I
performed in. It became a love of myself
performing
and really the art of performance
and then evolved into,
(13:48):
well, how does what goes behind that performance?
She now leads the architectural acoustics practice at
HDR,
which can include health care facilities,
data centers, industrial buildings, classroom settings, and correctional
facilities.
Gina said one of the first things to
consider with acoustics inside a building is what
might be creating noise outside the facility. On
(14:10):
the architectural acoustic side, we can be brought
on to a project very early on in
the planning stages.
So we would discuss site evaluations,
how this site may impact the acoustics, whether
that be potentially high noise environment.
Right? Is it near an airport
(14:30):
or a highway? Is it near a freight
rail line that has vibration?
Then her team begins looking at how the
space inside the facility will be used and
what will impact acoustics.
Space planning and planning for appropriate adjacencies
is going to be a number one. If
you don't have a loud space next to
(14:50):
a quiet space, then there wouldn't be a
need for a high sound isolation system necessarily.
And that doesn't just go for room functions.
That also applies
to the layout when you're talking about where
do my mechanical units on the roof sit.
Right? Is it over
space that's noise sensitive, or are my duct
(15:11):
mains dropping over a space that needs lower
noise levels? The acousticians
work with other specialists
as the project moves from overall space planning
into more detailed design. And so we work
with building owners and users,
architects,
interior designers, and structural engineers, mechanical engineers,
(15:33):
then as the design of the facility progresses
to help inform that design.
And so in later phases, we actually do
quantitative analysis
of the mechanical systems to calculate
the noise
into a space, the vibration
impacting a space or coming out of a
space, analyzing the finishes and how that impacts
(15:55):
communications
and reverberation,
and then looking at the sound isolation systems
of the interior
partitions and exterior envelope. Gina's group uses a
number of modeling programs to predict how a
space will sound.
Often, clients want more than just a written
report to convey the results.
It's often difficult to
(16:17):
interpret
what words
mean in terms of it is 30 decibels
in this space and how does that translate
to the actual oral environment?
So we supplement
that type of reporting, written reporting, and measurement
with auralizations
and audio examples of what a space might
(16:37):
sound like or how systems are impacting
the the acoustics of a space. Using specialized
software that can input a number of factors
to produce samples
of how a space might sound, which is
called auralization.
Most often,
we are doing those simulations using the EASE
software
and modifying
(16:58):
the finishes of the space, showing different examples
of how adding more or less acoustic treatment
or in acoustic treatment
in different locations,
how that would impact the acoustics of a
space. For example, within a performance space, an
acoustician
might take raw audio of a voice
Sound.
(17:19):
And simulate how it would sound from the
right side of the main floor of the
performance hall they're designing.
Sound.
Versus the sound on the left side of
the balcony.
Sound.
Or how raw audio of an instrument sounds.
And simulate that from the front row.
(17:44):
And then the nosebleed seats.
Spaces like that can involve some pretty interesting
clients. There was a recent design in the
past five years
that we did for the Walter Reed Medical
Center, and it included an auditorium.
And that auditorium
(18:05):
will be used for both broadcast
functions and live functions, and it's my understanding
that the president will often speak from the
auditorium. However, when you're designing a hospital,
the acoustical goals are entirely different. An example
of that could be looking at a patient
room in a health care project, something like
(18:27):
that. We would be looking at
noise control
to provide a space that is calm
and healing, where someone can rest.
In addition to that, we're thinking about intelligible
communication.
Maybe there's messages being shared there or speech
that's being shared there that needs to be
heard very clearly in that patient room. So
(18:49):
the challenge becomes achieving intelligibility
within the room, but privacy from ears outside
the room. And then another consideration
in that space would be, well, while I
want someone who is in that room to
very clearly hear what's being communicated.
I don't want the people outside of that
room
(19:10):
to hear what's being communicated. So it's also
isolating that room from the adjacent spaces. Depending
on the purpose of a room, a simulation
might compare raw audio of someone speaking. Dyloxetine.
Loxetine.
Versus someone speaking with background conversation in the
space.
Dyloxetine.
(19:30):
Loxetine.
Versus someone speaking with background noise and reverberation.
Diloxetine.
Diloxetine.
As health care providers imagine new types of
spaces to promote healing,
it can start to blend the acoustical considerations
of different types of buildings. I have had
(19:50):
medical facilities that have a lot of mixed
use.
One example of that is the think whole
person
project in the Omaha area.
There was a theater
where
videos would be played. There was a large
six story atrium space that had multiple functions,
patients moving through it as they were going
(20:12):
to their provider spaces,
had a cafe,
and then also had the desire to have
live performance
and had a a permanent piano
situated in it. And all of those functions
were open to the atrium,
which was adjacent to the provider spaces. So
it was a very interesting mix of both
(20:33):
performance
type space
and medical.
Office buildings and especially open offices or public
spaces
present their own considerations.
In the context
of
sound masking systems and how they're used in
design,
they're typically not going to be just white
noise. They're actually
specific spectrums
(20:54):
and tuned
to provide more energy in certain frequencies than
others, to provide more masking performance.
We'll often see those utilized
in health care applications,
in commercial building
applications, in offices,
And the function of those systems is to
increase privacy
(21:15):
either in open plan spaces or closed plan
spaces
by introducing,
more background sound. That type of system can
provide more privacy in an open space, but
also provides a subliminal comfort. As an acoustician,
there's a couple of things that are really
difficult.
And one is to walk into,
(21:36):
your open office and the sound masking is
off because you are the first person to
know, and it it drives me insane.
The third area of the acoustics team focuses
on traffic noise analysis work where Tim Casey
(21:59):
began his career.
My father was a electrical engineer at ENSF
for most of my childhood, and I was
around that field. I was around the rail
(22:19):
yards. I was able to see other things
besides the electrical engineering part of it and
was really intrigued and interested in the
environmental aspect of engineering.
That's Mike Parsons, a traffic noise analysis practice
manager in HDR's Denver office. Mukul Pal,
one of Mike's counterparts in Vienna, Virginia, experienced
a similar family inertia into the world of
(22:41):
engineering
while growing up nearly 8,000 miles across the
globe. I come from a family of engineers.
My dad, my uncles,
even my sister,
my cousin brothers. I mean, in India, it's
a saying, right, that either you
would be an engineer or a doctor when
you grow up. So
I kind of had,
(23:02):
no choice up in the beginning. But just
like Mike's, father, my dad is also an
electrical engineer. Muckel started his career as a
civil engineer.
Much like his boss, Tim Casey,
he ventured into traffic noise analysis through an
EIS project in Chicago.
During his early projects, he met Mike, and
they bonded over their similar backgrounds,
(23:23):
which included a love of sports. As I
got into my college career, I went to
a division three school with the hopes of
playing basketball,
and the school did not have an engineering
program. So after my first year, I started
thinking that
it wasn't really where I saw my future.
And then after my second year, I was
sure I was interested in doing engineering work.
(23:43):
Meanwhile, Mookal was raised playing entirely different sports.
I was a very good cricket player. I
I'm still a good cricket player, but
I represented
my college
teams for badminton,
cricket, and a lot of table tennis, volleyball,
squash. I mean, lots of games. Mike began
as an air quality engineer where he also
(24:03):
found himself working EIS reports.
So he began cracking open textbooks,
staying up until midnight, and taught himself about
traffic noise analysis on the job. There are
state and federal regulations that determine when a
traffic noise analysis has to be done, and
they have different types. And the type that
drive these analysis is called a type one
(24:24):
project. So that would be the addition of
a traffic lane, a substantial change in vertical
or horizontal alignment,
and requirements like that. When a project has
those requirements,
by law, we have to do a traffic
noise analysis.
So when you do that analysis, you predict
whether the results you come up with will
(24:44):
meet state and federal regulations.
If they do, great. If not, then you
have to design
traffic noise abatement to help meet the requirements
each state lays out. The first step of
noise analysis
involves identifying the noise receptors in the project
area, the noise sensitive location such as people's
backyards or a restaurant patio.
(25:05):
So once the project
initiates
and lands on our desk, just like a
normal
roadway improvement project,
adding a new lane or we are building
a highway on a a new alignment,
we just take that study area and we
determine various locations where we have to go
(25:26):
and do some field noise monitoring.
Then we just take what we call ANSI
nineteen eighty three type one or type two
noise meters,
and we deploy them in the field and
do some, quick half an hour, twenty minute
measurements on various different sites throughout the corridor
to get a good sampling of what the
ambient noise is in the corridor. From there,
(25:49):
they get to work predicting how the noise
levels would change after the project is built
using software mandated by the Federal Highway Administration.
Then we bring back and we basically replicate
the existing conditions
in the traffic noise model
PNM, and we take all the roadway design
information and all that stuff with the existing
(26:11):
conditions and code it in the traffic noise
model. Then we put the traffic in there
as well, and we go traffic speeds
and all the grade features, some ground zones,
some
trees.
And we try to replicate whatever is in
the field,
and then we let the noise model do
its magic and predict the noise.
(26:32):
Because traffic noise fluctuates,
the measurements are averaged to determine a baseline
sound level. In traffic noise, we use the
LAQ, which is equivalent continuous sound pressure level,
which you can describe it as the average
noise over a given period of time, which
is an hour in traffic noise. So what
we're comparing our predictions against is an hourly
(26:55):
average noise level. Well, you or I might
not think about measuring sound beyond adjusting the
volume on your smartphone or TV,
Mookal and Mike described how sound level relates
to traffic noise.
Fun fact about traffic noise levels
is the sound levels additions
are based on the grid wake units.
(27:15):
So if you add two fifty decibel sound
levels together, it's not gonna give you a
hundred decibels. It's gonna give you 53 decibels.
It's tough to explain
when, you know, another way to look at
it too is, like,
it if you double traffic, it only raises
noise levels three decibels, which is just barely
perceptible to the human ear. Unlike Gina's simulations,
(27:39):
the reports they produce don't usually include audio.
They're filled with regulations and data from their
noise measurements,
often depicted using GIS
to provide a more appealing
visual communication of the results on a map.
And if those are within a threshold of
three decibels, which is
the normal rates that a human ear can
(27:59):
perceive.
Any change less than three decibels,
the human ears, believe it or not, Danny,
does not perceive
the change. So anything above three decibels is
what it perceives. And then we just take
the model and do the build conditions. And
based on our general NEPA process, we predict
noise in the next twenty years, and there
(28:20):
are federal guidelines of what the noise levels
have to be. When the new roadway is
expected to exceed state abatement noise criteria
or significantly increase noise levels by perhaps 10
to 15 decibels, for example,
that's when the state DOT needs to investigate
an abatement option and get public input. For
the most part, the solution just comes down
(28:42):
to the size of the sound barrier
in the form of a wall alongside the
interstate. There are other options
that are considered, but usually none of them
really have any kind of staying power. For
instance, with trees or vegetation, you have to
have at least a hundred feet
of dense
trees or vegetation that are present year round.
So that often is not the case in
(29:04):
any of these project areas to provide any
kind of noise reduction.
A A lot of times, there's been a
lot of studies that show those
are they provide psychological benefit. If you can't
see it, you don't get bugged and bothered
by it as much. Other options are berms,
which while they work great, they often need
a bigger footprint than a noise barrier. So
those often aren't included in projects.
(29:26):
You can create a buffer. So there's there's
things like that. While they're looked at and
examined,
more often than not, they're not included in
a project just due to space and footprint
requirements.
Occasionally, a project might introduce some other variables
into the equation, including one that brought Mike
back to his days tagging along with his
father at the rail yard.
(29:49):
I worked on a cool one over the
years. It was the BNSF BNSF Railway Logistics
Park in Kansas City. It was a brand
new facility they were building. And, there was
a lot of different aspects that went into
this project. It had not only the rail
line going in and out of this facility,
but at the facility itself, it had big
overhead cranes because this facility was bringing in
(30:10):
these rail cars with with a cargo on
it that they would have to take off,
and then they'd load that onto semis,
and they'd bring that to a logistics
park and warehouse facility. Which included many more
sources of sound than a six lane interstate.
So I had to predict noise from not
only the trains, but the stationary and mobile
equipment on the ground like the trains and
the forklifts.
(30:31):
And then we had noise from the the
semi trucks going in and out of the
warehouse
and a bunch of different aspects
that were creating noise and vibration for the
receptors around the area. And, they were also
building a new interchange as part of that
project. While the Federal Highway Administration
and State Departments of Transportation
govern roadway traffic noise,
(30:52):
the Federal Railroad Administration
and Federal Transit Administration
have their own regulations for rail noise.
This project fell somewhere in between. And there's
not a lot of clear cut noise regulations
that go along with a project like that.
So when we do these traffic noise analyses,
it's pretty straightforward with, you know, each state
has their own regs. You gotta follow it.
(31:13):
But here, it was gonna get reviewed by
the Kansas DOT,
and I had all these different aspects and
noise sources that were going into it. So
I had to put together a plan
and different regulations
to follow and present that and get the
DOT's buy off on it. And, ultimately,
when we presented it to them, they bought
off on it, and we did this analysis
(31:33):
with all these different noise sources in the
project area.
Sometimes the type of project is straightforward, but
the mere size of the project makes it
more memorable.
One of the most recent projects that I
did in North Carolina,
it's a design build project about seven miles
long, six lanes in each direction, and lots
of receptors. And and, interestingly,
(31:56):
analysis to be done on that project with
keeping up with the design changes and things
like that. In the end, we ended up
with 24,000
linear feet of noise barriers that constitute about
425,000
square feet. So quite a massive project.
With projects that size, finding alternative solutions to
noise barriers can save millions of dollars.
(32:18):
Mike mentioned one such project. There was a
big design build analysis in Minnesota
on T H 212, and they were really
expanding
the existing highway from a two lane road
to a four lane controlled access highway on
new alignment. So it was kind of cutting
through all these neighborhoods, but there was enough
space. So when they did their preliminary
design, they had noise walls
(32:40):
everywhere throughout this project. But back then, they
let me really help and guide the design
a lot on eliminating these noise walls. So
we're able to change the grade and go
down further. We're able to use a lot
of the extra soil when they reduce the
grade
to use as berms. And I was able
to model these berms
and really save millions in potential noise barrier
(33:01):
costs. So that was kind of a fun
one. Though you may not see them, one
of the latest innovations in traffic noise abatement
is the introduction of clear walls. There are
clear walls now. I think it's up in
Wisconsin, if I'm not wrong. They have used
a special
material
from plastic, which is clear. So from the
driver's perspective, you are just driving and you
(33:23):
won't realize
that there is a wall unless there is
a reflection of any of that sort. Spaces
I've seen those walls are on
really beautiful environmental spaces. Like, there's a bay
in Florida where they're been used, and they
wanted the people coming you know, the walls
went under the bridge and off the bridge,
and they wanted the people to be able
to see the water still and enjoy the
water there. And more so, you know, everywhere
(33:46):
I've seen them, they're not to block the
pristine view of the environment that people have.
If you study traffic noise for a living,
then, yes, you also begin to take note
of it when you're not working. Oh, absolutely.
You know, you you constantly
are are,
you know, judging some of the levels, of
course. Nowadays, even
(34:06):
there are these apps,
that you can download on your phone
to get an average
noise levels wherever you,
want to measure. As Mike reminds us, no
matter the profession,
isn't that something that everyone does? I mean,
I'll tell you what. I grew up with
an electrical engineer father who would always point
out power lines,
(34:26):
and I'm married to a dentist who always
or not always, but occasionally points out things
about people's smiles or teeth. So
I'm always like, why would you do that?
But now I always find myself looking at
noise walls, especially ones that have, like, some
cool aesthetic treatments. Right? Then I find myself
noticing that everywhere I go. Like, oh, that's
a ugly noise. Well, that's a pretty noise.
(34:47):
Well,
yeah. You know, my young self would be
disappointed in my old self, but, you know,
here you are. And once again, Mookle is
finding the apple doesn't fall far from the
tree. The kid who is six years old,
of course, you know, that's the age. He's
always inquisitive. Right? So you're driving and he
is he has come to know, like, you
know, what, dad does. And
(35:10):
he is constantly pointing.
Papa, that's the wall that you built. Right?
So I'm like, oh my god.
For more information,
visit hdrinc.com/speakingofdesign.
(35:31):
You'll find pictures,
bios of our guests, and links to related
articles. And be sure to subscribe and drop
us a review on your favorite podcast app.
Thanks for listening. Special thanks to Tim Casey
for lending us his music for this episode.
You'll find more from Tim Casey and the
Martyrs anywhere that you find music online.
Additional thanks to Amanda Weiss.
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