acoustics labyrinth

The architectural acoustics course, rebuilt as a map rather than a stack of slides. Forty-seven units across nine chapters, from what a wave is to what a consultant is asked to measure — and every one of them connected to the others by the terms they have in common. It runs in the browser with nothing to install, no account and nothing to hand over.

how it works

A unit is one idea, stated in a handful of lines. Some of the words in those lines are underlined: they are doors. Click one and the unit opens onto every other place in the course that uses the same term — the harder units below it, the simpler ones above, and its neighbours at the same depth. A term with nothing beneath it gives you its definition instead. None of those connections are drawn by hand; they are what the shared vocabulary of the subject already implies, which is also why the map is honest about where the course is thin.

Above the unit sit two further views. Zoom out once and you see the whole chapter as a web of units, arranged left to right by difficulty; zoom out again and you see the nine chapters themselves, and how they lean on each other. Every line in either web carries the word that made it, so a connection always says why it is there. Zooming does not cut: the unit you are reading grows into its place on the map, and shrinks back out of it, so you never lose where you were.

what is in it

Waves · Objects · Rooms · Acoustical Quantities · Control Rooms · Recording Studios · Venues · Architecture · Environment & Consultancy.

Roughly the shape of the Architectural Acoustics module: the physics first — pressure, speed, wavelength, impedance, diffraction — then what surfaces and rooms do with it, then the quantities the discipline argues in, and finally the four places the subject is practised, which are a control room, a live room, a hall and someone else's boundary. A hundred and seventeen terms are defined, and each of them is reachable from any unit that uses it.

using it

  • Click an underlined word to open it; click it again to close it. One at a time.
  • The three buttons at the top — unit, unit web, chapter web — are the three zoom levels. + and − step between them, escape steps back out, and c closes an open word.
  • In either web, drag to pan and scroll to move; the + − ⊡ controls in the corner zoom and fit. Hovering a node tells you what is in it.
  • Schemes changes the colours, the type and the drawing style; the choice is kept in your own browser and nowhere else.