He came into acoustics through music, following his ears. The job taught him that a room can sound perfectly quiet and still be wrong.
So how does a musician end up measuring rooms for a living?
Ahamed got into acoustics sideways, through music. He was learning how to make it, and somewhere in that process he started noticing that the room was doing as much to the sound as he was. Same track, different space, different result. That stuck with him. He went on to do a Bachelor of Music at LASALLE, and the curiosity about what rooms do to sound never really went anywhere. It just turned into a job.
What do people usually get wrong about acoustic testing?
They expect the verdict on the spot. He’s standing in the room with the equipment, numbers are moving on the screen, so surely he already knows. He doesn’t, not yet. What he collects on site is one part of the equation. The readings go back with him, get worked through properly, and only then do they mean something. The measurement is the evidence. The answer comes after the calculation.
What kind of readings give you the most trouble?
Usually it’s ACMV or equipment noise, and the reason it’s tricky is that it hides. You walk into the room and it sounds fine. Nobody’s complaining. Then the meter picks it up and there it is, plainly, sitting in the data. Some of it lives below what the ear really registers as sound at all, the sort of low frequency energy you’re more likely to feel in your chest than hear. A room can pass the human test and fail the measurement, and that gap is most of the job.
Tell us about a room you’re proud of getting right.
The room built for John Hsu. Months of going back and forth on the design and the acoustics, adjusting, checking, adjusting again, until it finally landed at studio levels. The part Ahamed is proud of isn’t that it sounds good, because plenty of rooms sound good to somebody. It’s that nobody had to take anyone’s word for it. The room was measured, and the numbers said it was there.
What’s the best thing about working with this team?
The freedom to get creative when something needs solving. Nothing is off the table here, and for someone who came in from music rather than through a conventional engineering route, that matters. Ideas get heard on whether they’d work, not on where they came from.
What do you want to be working on in a few years?
Bigger rooms. Theatres, concert halls, the kind of spaces where the acoustics are the whole point and thousands of people notice if you get it wrong. Which is a neat place for someone who came in through music to be heading.
Bonus fact: Ahamed still makes music. He writes soundtracks for indie films and performs at electronic music gigs, so there’s a decent chance you’ve been in a room he was responsible for the sound of, in more ways than one.