Acoustics in India - Part I

Acoustics in India

At last we decided to make a recording theatre ourselves for us with the little money and the little ideas that we had in our minds. It happened in 1982, when I was working with a social service institution, whose mission was to produce study materials for non formal education. The compulsion to make a studio was necessarily demanded as every ones’ prevailing reasons - more rentals, non cooperation of sound recordists, unsatisfactory result, non availability of call sheets, etc. But making a recording theatre was not an ordinary challenge, the reasons were two; one is procuring the equipments and another is treating with acoustics.

Today you don’t find much difficulty in sourcing the equipments, because they are easily available in the market. Internet search engines help you to find the right person who can genuinely supply these equipments and support you as well. But acoustics confuses every human being a lot: it is expensive; you need a consultant; whom you doubt in so many ways - right from his ability on job to looting commission from the suppliers of materials; without him sourcing the right type of material for insulation and acoustics is a taunting pain; you may know glass wool, but you may not know the density of that, and how many layers you may have to use. Acoustics involves a lot of labours, sincere labours; because once the insulation work is completed you can not check it up weather the materials (as they cause tremendous itching on the skin) are properly kept inside. And you need different types of skilled workers, mason, carpenters, air conditioning consultant - ducting persons, upholstery workers, metal fabricator, electrician, electronics engineer, and computer hardware/software experts in Audio Visual field. To integrate all these workforce is further a very tough job.

When any of these consultant or worker does not keep up to time schedule the entire project repels and collapses the total programme.

A good studio needs to look good also, that can create pleasing environment to the artists or at least that does not disturb mood of an artist. Simultaneously, the interior should not interfere the acoustics treatment. Many interior designers and architects have been enemy to the acoustician.

Understanding all these facts we decided to make our studio by our selves with the little knowledge we had and the forgotten theories what we studied about acoustics. First, we decided to buy some books about studio acoustics to recall the knowledge about insulation and acoustics treatment; and they came. But they all were written by outsiders. I still remember that I bought a costly book about hundred recipes of salad making, but nothing I was able to make because of the non availability of the particular vegetables and fruits of those kind referred to in our country. The same thing happened to me with the books I bought. The materials mentioned in those books were either expensive or not available locally. Even today the problem being the same, acoustics tiles, acoustics spray, corner traps, and any imported material, is enormously priced. Because it is imported, of course the reasons are there - transportation, customs duty, and being rarely selling products. Recently we approached a company that is trading acoustics spray on walls; guess the rate they demanded! Rs. 18,000/sqmt (in Chennai, the cost of the contractors’ building of per sqmt is Rs. 10,000 and in the outskirts of Chennai, one can buy beautiful apartment for Rs. 18000/sqmt. Not only the price, their conditions were also scary, since their marketing is monotonous and aristocrat (they normally do not reply you properly) their behaviour is also abnormal. The same situation prevailed in those days also where the glass wool was imported and the price was exuberant; any acoustics tiles you had to import, probably sonotex was the most popular but the transportation and customs duty and the importing process were very tedious and time consuming. Few companies that were making fibre wood boards demanded a lot of money, as they were rare (very recently lot of manufacturers of fibre wood boards have become competitive with the pioneers in quality and price).

Considering all these facts we decided to take a different route to make the studio; that is to make with inexpensive materials; it is nothing but not pre fabricated materials.