Casa Ostinato
A music room inside a 1930s apartment, built for a drummer and a pianist who share a wall with their neighbours.
- Floor area
- 38 m²
- Sound isolation
- 68 dB
- Reverberation
- 0.5 s
- Completed
- 2021
A drum kit next to a shared wall is a legal problem before it is an acoustic one. We built a second room inside the first, touching the old structure only through rubber mounts, and gave up eleven centimetres on every side to do it.
The linen panels are tuned in pairs. Two take the low boom of the kick drum, four soften the piano's upper register, and the bare plaster between them keeps the room from going dead. The neighbours were invited to the first rehearsal and heard nothing from their kitchen.
The figure of this room
Sand on a plate shaken at 170 Hz comes to rest along the lines where nothing moves. Every room we design has a pattern like this at each bass note. Drag the frequency to see how quickly it changes.
A simulation of an ideal square plate, shown as an illustration. It is not a measurement of the finished room.