Sound Advice
Volume 11, Issue 2, 2008 

We have SoundPLAN!

Wieland Acoustics is proud to announce the addition of the SoundPLAN® software suite to our arsenal of noise modeling techniques. SoundPLAN enhances our ability to provide computer models for all projects that include traffic and/or mechanical equipment noise. Such projects include transportation, residential, commercial and industrial studies, and those regarding any stationary source or a source inside a building. SoundPLAN has been adopted by major acoustical consulting firms around the globe to augment analytical capabilities and provide a better product for the client.

This innovative software takes the kind of careful, thorough analysis we have always performed and enhances it by providing a fully three-dimensional model and far more sophisticated capabilities. The program can be used for projects that require the calculation of noise levels over areas as small as a single residential yard up to an entire city while simultaneously taking into account many different variables such as atmospheric and ground conditions, multiple barrier placements, noise reflections from buildings, and detailed noise source spectrum and duration data.

Apart from the detail enhancement, how else does it help us provide a better product? In perfect keeping with our client-oriented goals, the SoundPLAN analysis produces vivid full color noise maps worth a thousand words, especially to the lay person. Seeing the information displayed graphically helps clients grasp unfamiliar and complicated concepts much more quickly and easily than seeing the same data in tabular format. In addition, we can provide our tabulated results to support the graphics, our findings and recommendations.

A recent project involved an assessment of how various different wall layouts at a proposed retail center would affect the noise levels that customers would be subjected to at outdoor restaurant areas. Using SoundPLAN we were able to provide detailed noise contour maps showing the distribution of noise for the different configurations, helping our client to decide which would be the best design. For an example of a SoundPLAN noise map, click here.

Contrasted with the noise contour figures of ten years ago, today’s noise map illustration is astonishing. Gone are the hard-copy base maps with hand-applied black-crepe-tape contour lines and colored-marker-shaded areas that took hours of painstaking work for our graphic artists, and that were impossible to update or revise. Thanks to today’s software, computer models can be revised, updated and re-run, and new contour maps and figures can be produced that are far superior to non-digital work products (and nary a graphic artist in sight!).

Not all of our projects are appropriate candidates for SoundPLAN analysis, and we still offer other types of modeling, such as TNM (as currently required by Caltrans, for example). However, we are happy to have invested in a new and very capable tool, to offer it at no extra charge to our clients and to demonstrate once again our commitment to unsurpassed service.

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