Acoustical Performance

Cavaliers learn best when they can listen without distraction. CHS was designed & constructed to prevent excessive background noise and long sound reverberation, which negatively affect speech communication.

In a classroom, background noise can come from many places, including the following:

· Sounds from outside the building, such as buses and leaf blowers

· Sounds from inside the building, such as students talking in the hallway

· Sounds from inside the classroom, such as air conditioning units and students in the room

CHS has been designed with high STC (sound transmission class) assemblies to prevent sound transfer between spaces and noise-reducing devices in the HVAC systems to minimize background noise.

Reverberation describes how sounds act in a room after they first happen. Sounds stay in the room when they bounce off desks or walls. If many sounds do this at once, it can get very loud. Highly-absorptive ceilings have been incorporated in classrooms and corridors to reduce the amount of reflected sound within the space.