Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Common House Sound Proofing

[Elizabeth Stevenson (tamgoddess]

A centering exercise might work in a yoga class, but I don't see it working
at a common meal, unless, perhaps it's a common meal at a monastery! Anyone
who rang a bell at our common dinners would likely end up having the bell
forced upon them as part of their meal.

All kidding aside, the beginning of a common meal can be quite chaotic.
Parents are trying to rein in children, spouses are seeing each other after
a long day at work, the cook team may be putting final touches on dessert.
It is not a good time to try to impose discipline on each other to keep
quiet. It's a time for people to joyfully come together again. In the nine
years we have been using ours, we had never been successful at keeping the
noise down, until we made the room itself quieter.

What happens is that the noise reverberates, so you have to speak louder to
be heard, and it's a positive-feedback loop, getting ever louder. Ringing a
bell would disrupt conversation and add to the noise. And it would be
annoying. Try to keep the atmosphere like home-would you want your spouse
ringing a bell at you to tell you to shut up?

Better to nip that in the bud beforehand. Make it a priority to install
soundproofing of some sort at construction.

Extrapolate this example to all of your site. Every time you can make the
physical plant meet some need instead of relying on disciplined human
behavior, opt for the physical solution. The less you have to rely on people
controlling themselves, the more harmony you will have. And the less culture
new arrivals will have to learn in order to fit in.

I am forwarding this to the person in our group who found the tiles we
eventually put on our ceiling, in the hopes she will remember what the
product is and where you can get it. It has done wonders for our sanity.

-- 
Liz Stevenson
Southside Park Cohousing
Sacramento, California
tamgoddess [at] attbi.com
> From: "Gary Kent" <garykent [at] uniserve.com>
> Reply-To: cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org
> Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2002 11:11:45 -0400
> To: "Coho list serv" <cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org>
> Subject: [C-L]_Common House Sound Proofing
> 
> We are in the final, exciting stage of designing our common house. The
> ceiling in the dining room will be quite high (15-18 ft.) and there will be
> no carpeting. Conventional ceiling tiles do not appeal to us and have heard
> there are other material options that work quite well. Have checked the
> archives and there is some pretty good information but could not locate very
> much about materials that can be used at the building stage.
> 
> Like the idea of controlling the noise at source and that is something we
> shall address in some form. The idea of using a bell at each table to remind
> folks that the noise level is rising sounds good, as does a centreing
> exercise at the beginning of each meal.
> 
> However....some material suggestions would be much appreciated.
> 
> Gary Kent
> Roberts Creek Cohousing
> Roberts Creek, BC
> www.cohousing.ca/robertscreek
> 
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