An early childhood education center is a building for which issues related to acoustic are important, both for the children who carry out different types of learning and for the supervisory staff who practice their professional activity there.
This includes: premises such as atrium, play rooms of different the sections, sleeping rooms, offices, medical rooms, staff rooms, halls and stairwells that can be crossed regularly by children: a special attention shall be paid to them in terms of sound insulation in buildings.
A fairly common imperfection encountered in terms of acoustics of an early childhood center lies in the insufficiency, in quality and / or in quantity, of materials that absorb sound properly at the medium and high frequencies, which results in a level of acoustic comfort that leaves something to be desired.
Because if the reverberation time, characterizing the temporal sound decay, reaches values that are too important, then the considered spaces have an insufficient speech intelligibility and favor an increase in the ambient sound levels which is the consequence of the wish. of each one (child or adult) to be better heard by raising the voice, such an increase in sound levels being very undesirable and even counterproductive.
ITS has participated in improving the acoustics of an early childhood eduction center in the region of Bourg-en-Bresse, in the county of Ain (Auvergne Rhône Alpes region, France).
The acoustic situation of this early childhood education center was characterized, for several rooms, on the one hand by an equivalent absorption area lower than what is required to limit the reverberation sufficiently (despite the presence of a sub-roof of which it was expected that it provides) and, secondly by an insufficient acoustic insulation between rooms, due to the gap (up to 1 m) left between the top of the dividing walls and the under-roof.
The arrangements made consisted of installing absorbent wall panels, suspended absorbent elements, and extending the dividing walls with dedicated construction systems, to ensure the necessary airborne sound isolation functionality while permitting the introduction, in the rooms of the early childhood education center, with an additional equivalent acoustic absorption area helping to limit the reverberation in rooms being on both sides.
The satisfaction of the Client and the users (those sufficiently old to speak about it) was measured, being according to the information which was gathered: entire for the improvement in terms of acoustics and for the visual aspect as well (the absorbing materials used, chosen among from a wide range of colors, each one being more attractive than others, often allow to brighten such premises of a early childhood education center).