I’ve certainly not experienced many domes. We’ve visited Italy, Texas (perhaps 20 years ago) and essentially had the tour of available domes there.
The one take away we’ve remembered is the sound; both reduced external sound and the “empty house” echos.
I’m assuming that echoing in a dome is due to the concrete walls with a relatively large expanse of empty space between barriers and “furniture” where a stick house is mostly full of “wood.”
Is this due to my lack of experience with most domes? I’ve not seen much in literature about the effects of sound in a dome. Most of the construction videos have a “large hall” echo, but that is much like any empty house.
It seems to me that the roundness and hardness of a dome would tend to reflect and focus sound rather than dissipate sound.
Yes, echoes can be an issue if a dome is empty and the walls have been smoothed. The same issue can exist in square spaces if they are large. The same solutions work too. I was thinking of leaving the natural texture of the shot crete above 8’ and hoping the inner walls break up the echoes. I can always hang up some flags or tapestries or something like that if needed. In smaller domes, under 50’, it’s not much of an issue based on the ones I’ve been in, especially once the walls and furniture break up the sound.
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Everything @Katrina_James said is absolutely spot on.
Echos in domes are crazy cool when it’s an empty shell. Fun fact, if two people stand opposite of each other in a large dome (like a 230-foot diameter hemisphere) they can hear each other whisper.
Regular houses with bare concrete floors and bare walls are also quite lively. With carpets and furniture, most of the sound is contained. The dome is no different. Average rooms in domes with furniture and carpet are usually no different than a regular house.
But nobody wants a dome with only small, enclosed spaces. You want tall, curved, vaulted open spaces. That’s the inherent advantage of building a dome in the first place. The sound quality can become quite lively and “echo-ey?” in these spaces.
Creating “sound traps” with carpet, soft furniture, and even sound absorbing flags (which we’ve done before), will bring the echos under control.
You may not want to tamp the sound down too much. We had a dome owner install a pipe organ in their home. Another dome owner holds choir practice inside because the director loved the sound so much. In one large gym, the superintendent didn’t install a set of sound baffles because they loved how loud it was.
On the flipside, the dome is an excellent sound barrier to outside noises. It gives the owner a chance to custom design their interior aural space more or less independent to the outside world.
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Perhaps, but as age sets in with a partner or family, noisemaking devices tend to diverge. Disaccord tends to prevail and sounds like the party after a wedding!
We want to build two joined partial toruses, earth-sheltered on the back side, which will be rooms that don’t need windows - bathrooms and closets. I am a huge Lord of the Rings fan and have bought numerous photo backdrops with Lord of the Rings and Hobbit scenes. I’m going to have them mounted on padded panels and panel living room, studio, TV room and dining room walls with them. We’ll also have rugs, but much more surface will be covered with the panels than with the rugs. I think that will damp the noise pretty well.
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