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At the University of Michigan, an
electronic classroom is home to cutting-edge audiovisual research
by Deborah Snoonian, P.E.
Playing video games, listening to music,
going to concerts … sounds like college life, right?
For the past few years, architecture students at the University
of Michigan can get course credit for these pastimes. In 1998,
the university’s physical plant department spent nearly
half a million dollars to outfit the main lecture hall at
the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning with
state-of-the-art computing, sound, lighting, and projection
systems, transforming it from a mere classroom into a working
audiovisual (AV) laboratory. The technological overhaul was
designed by architecture professor Mojtaba Navvab (known as
Moji), who has spent his career immersed in the science of
light and sound. As his students learn the basics of environmental
technology and AV design, they also serve as subjects in a
variety of experiments that attempt to link measurement to
perception.
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Collecting qualitative and quantitative
data at the same time is crucial for improved sound and lighting
design, Moji believes. AV studies typically entail a jumble
of measurements and analyses, and codes and regulations dictate
appropriate sound levels for different settings as well as
minimum lighting levels for various tasks. But the numbers
that measure acoustics and lighting—decibels, foot-candles,
lamberts—are difficult to understand when they’re
devoid of context. “Sixty decibels may be a ‘normal’
sound volume, but what does that really mean? What does that
sound like?” he says. “What people perceive in a
given space matters more than the measurements themselves.”
The interdisciplinary nature of his research in the AV sciences
has teamed him with colleagues from the computer sciences,
physics, optometry, and psychology departments.
So, armed with digital-age tools
and a captive subject pool of up to 150 students at a time,
he simulates real-world lighting and sound conditions and
forges connections between what instruments can measure and
what the senses take in—connections that have aided design
on the university campus and beyond.
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