Good conditions for teaching, learning, and practicing a musical instrument are crucial for a musician’s progress. Small rooms for teaching and practicing musical instruments have specific requirements about acoustic performance and strong influence on the perception of the users. Acoustical problems in music classrooms may cause difficulties for teachers to identify mistakes from the young students performance other than those originated from the room itself. For this paper, three music classrooms were evaluated according to reverberation, background noise, and airborne sound insulation between rooms. Thus, reverberation time (RT), background noise level, and standardized level difference (DnT), as a function of frequency and according to ISO 3382-2:2008 and ISO 140-4:1998 standards, were measured and judged. As some results have disagreed from literature recommendations, the main faults of each room were highlighted, considering the type of instrument that is taught, and suggestions for acoustic adjustment were made.

In support of the National Building Code of Canada, The National Research Council Canada has published research report RR-335 which describes the results of measurements of the transmission of structure-borne noise through junctions between mass timber elements. The Code only allows for the use of measured data for the vibration reduction index from the NRC's reports or reports from other research institutes. The Code does not currently allow for the use of empirical data for the calculation of the apparent sound transmission class of mass timber buildings. A lack of published data for typical mass timber junctions used in Canada can result in the overdesign of buildings or buildings which don't meet the acoustic requirements of the Code. The NRC has embarked on a program to measure the vibration reduction index of a number of mock junctions of typical junctions used in Canada including junctions between cross-laminated timber floors and lightweight timber framed walls. The new data will aid in the development of empirical models of typical Canadian mass timber constructions.

Laboratory listening studies are typically limited in the number of people who can participate because of the effort that is involved in setting up and carrying out the experiment for each participant. This effort has significantly increased since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic due to the heightened public health requirements for in-person studies. This increase in effort and the resulting limit on the number of participants can be avoided by implementing the listening study as an online interface, where participants can then run the experiment from the comfort of their home and anyone who has access to a computer and headphones is able to participate. Such an approach supports the goal of involving the general public, who are the ultimate target audience for the research outcome. This contribution presents the preliminary results of an online listening study assessing the perceived annoyance due to impact sounds in residential buildings. The interface was previously validated and presented (Internoise 2021) with limited data. Since then, the survey has been published online for worldwide access. The results are discussed in relation to the results of previous laboratory studies.

The National Research Council Canada is currently investigating the perceived annoyance due to impact sound in multi-unit residential buildings (MURBs). The first part of a subjective laboratory study on a number of different floor/ceiling assemblies was completed with 26 participants just before the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. To evaluate the feasibility of carrying out a similar study without in-person attendance, the same stimuli from the laboratory study were used to create an online listening test. The online listening test was created in JavaScript and HTML5 to run on any internet browser. This paper will present the results of the online listening test and compare them to the laboratory study, focusing on the obvious drawbacks of an uncontrolled remote study such as the uncertainty due to the participants' headphones and listening environment. With an expectation that in-person studies will remain difficult to realize in the near future, this contribution provides evidence whether remote subjective listening tests are a viable alternative to controlled laboratory studies for impact sound.