1. What is your job about
My job is essentially designing new developments (buildings / infrastructures) in terms of its acoustic properties, whether it be how much potential noise a new development is going to impose on the existing environment or the acoustic comfort of the building interior (how much external noise goes through inside, how echoey rooms are, how noise moves around in a room etc).

2. What’s your background?
I graduated as a Mechanical Engineer from UNSW, where I first encountered environmental and building acoustics through a course that UNSW offers. That made me interested in the field which lead me to dive deeper into the field by choosing Aeroacoustics as the focus of my thesis.
My passion for sound and acoustics is not stuck only in the academics side of it, but personally as well, as music have always been an essential part of my life.

3. Could someone with a different background do your job?
Absolutely!
It might sound daunting to jump in the Acoustics field without any prior experience / knowledge. But I believe it is absolutely something that you can learn on the job with the right mindset.
Having the basics does help ease you in better, but surprisingly, the field of Acoustics is quite vast and in my experience, no amount of digging about the field can truly prepare you for what’s in store.
Best way to learn is to jump in and give a crack at it with a mentality to learn!

4. What’s the coolest thing about your job?
The coolest thing for me is looking at the end product of your design of course! I love doing internal acoustics design and then testing it once it’s done.
This means that we test the acoustic performance of the walls, floors as well as the reverberation time (how echoey it is) of the building. To do this, we bring a massive speaker and blast loud noises and measure how the noise goes through the walls and floors, which makes me feel like a kid again!

5. What are the limitations of your job?
As important and interesting my work is, do acoustics aspect of a development does get overlooked at times by people. It’s something that people don’t exactly notice until they actually need it. A lot of people think that it might be something they can cut cost on, and when they do, then people would complain and get it fixed which would cost much more than actually designing for it.

It’s especially concerning when it affects people’s health (e.g., traffic / train noise disturbing residents sleep at night) or when it renders the building somewhat useless (e.g., school classrooms too echoey which renders the teachers’ lectures extremely hard to understand).

Thus, I believe it is important for people to start to be educated in this matter, and I for one would love to help spearhead this effort.