Let’s say there’s a baby’s room at one end of the hall and the parents’ room at the other. Each room has a door, but in this scenario, only one door will be closed, and the other will be open.
If the baby starts crying, does it make any difference which door is closed, in terms of the parents being able to hear, or is the volume just the same in either case when it reaches the parents’ ears?
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Edit: To be super clear, this is hypothetical, and if I had a baby, I’d want to hear the crying if it was happening 🙂
I have a door at the bottom of a stairway that opens to a shared hall with my neighbor, and when she’s jingling her keys and unlocking her door, it sounds like she’s right in my apartment. So I was wondering how well she can hear me at that time. Sounds like, unless there’s something one-way about the acoustics in my stairwell, I should assume she can hear me at that time about as well as I can hear her.
In: 18
That’s a good question with not a fixed answer.
With an ideal physics’ book on the hand and in an ideal world….. it’s more likely better to close the parent’s door as the door capacity to reduce the sound IS a fixed percentage of the incoming “energy” and when the sound reach the parents door it has less “energy” due to distance (same as an earbud inside your ear is loud and as you pop out at a distance you can’t barely hear it). On the contrary the way we perceive volume IS NOT by a fixed percentage of incoming energy (the so called decibels) so it’s better to dim the lower “energy” at the parent’s door as it will have a bigger impact on our hearing perception.
Although this is not the last answer…
Actually it’s compromise problem of maths. We have the sound that looses “energy” with distance with certain mathematical formula and we also have our hearing perception that work with a completely different mathematical formula. So the optimal solution may depends on the distance of the doors, the characteristics of the door and the “energy” coming out from the baby’s mouth. Different set up will bring different solutions.
Although this is not the last answer…
The described above is the ideal problem, in a real scenario there is reverberation that amplify the sound on the hall before parents door, that’s why sometimes close the baby’s door is a better option, but there are so many other factors such as geometry of the house, non ideal materials, absorption of the walls… an those factors can play a big role on changing the solution, so its quite a complex problem that needs either complex calculus and test or simulations…
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^(If someone wonders, the sounds looses intensity as inverse quadratic with distante and our sound perception follow a logarithmic pattern with sound intensity)
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