Lily Wang, Charles W. and Margre H. Durham Distinguished Professor and director of the Durham School of Architectural Engineering and Construction, was featured this summer in a Washington Post article identifying the need for the Acoustical Society of America to create a standard system for restaurant noise. Wang, an acoustician who has a Ph.D. in acoustics from Penn State University, dined with the Post’s Bishop Sand and Tom Sietsema at the Washington, D.C. Peruvian restaurant Pisco y Nazca to help Sand, audio producer and reporter, and Sietsema, The Post’s food critic, better understand a restaurant’s acoustic environment.
While concert halls design seating to absorb the same amount of sound as a normal human body – so it sounds the same whether it’s a full house – restaurants do not, and three things can happen when a sound wave hits anything:
Some sound gets reflected, some sound continues to grow to booming levels or some of it is absorbed. This isn’t necessarily a restaurant’s fault even though industrial design likely contributes to restaurants getting louder but diners also influence noise levels to a great degree.
“I do think that’s an issue with why restaurants have gotten louder, because I think there’s been an aesthetic change,” Wang told Sand and Sietsema during their dinner. “You know, we want to design a vibe that’s either kind of industrial or cool.”
Sietsema, who dines out about 10 times a week for work, selected Pisco y Nazca because it’s “the loudest restaurant” he’s ever reviewed in D.C. and compared the acoustics, in a 2019 review of the restaurant, to the noise of how “loud a jet engine sounds at takeoff.”