Most people train themselves to stop hearing the aircon, the traffic, the hum of a room. Diandra never managed it. That low-level sensitivity to noise is exactly what pulled her into acoustics, and now she gets paid to notice the things everyone else has tuned out.
Let’s start at the beginning. How did you end up in acoustics?
Diandra came into it through Engineering Physics at ITB. When it was time to pick a lab to specialise in, she went with building physics, drawn in by how much it covered: lighting, energy, how a building actually gets run. But she kept gravitating toward the acoustics side of it. She reckons it comes down to being sensitive to noise. Sound has always bothered her enough to make her curious about it, how you deal with it and what’s going on underneath. That curiosity never really switched off.
What were you doing before Soundzipper?
Pretty much this. Diandra has been an acoustic consultant from the start, with about two years of that spent in Jakarta, which puts her at roughly four years in the field.
What does a normal day look like?
Emails, her actual tasks, and a fair bit of going back over things she’s already learned, except deeper this time. Acoustics has a way of making you relearn the fundamentals at a level you didn’t quite catch the first time round.
Which project are you proudest of?
All of them, and she means it more sincerely than that sounds. For Diandra the measure is simple: if the client walks away happy with what the team delivered, that’s the one worth being proud of. By that logic, every finished project makes the list.
What’s the tricky part of the work?
Every project has its own version of tricky, because no two buildings behave the same way and no two teams work the same way. Her job is to make the design work on every level, so it fits the architecture and still hits the requirement. It gets even more real when Soundzipper is working under a contractor, because construction is unpredictable. One wall won’t perform exactly like the next, and she still has to land on the target. Noise is its own rabbit hole too, though the tools keep getting better. An acoustic camera, for instance, can basically show you where sound is leaking out. But ask her and she’ll tell you every part of acoustics is tricky in its own way. That’s a big part of why she likes it.
Best thing about the team?
The collaboration. Being able to bounce something off someone who actually gets it makes a real difference.
What do people usually get wrong about acoustics?
That it’s all one thing. Plenty of people still find the field a bit unfamiliar, though that’s shifting as more of them realise acoustics is even something to think about. The most common mix-up is treating room acoustics and noise control as the same problem. They aren’t. Room acoustics is about how sound behaves inside a space, things like reverberation time. Noise control is about stopping unwanted sound from getting in or out. Different problems, different approaches, and Soundzipper usually treats them separately.
Where do you want to be in a few years?
Diandra is honest that she doesn’t have a fixed answer yet, and she’s fine with that. Acoustics is enormous. Now that more people are paying attention to it, she wants to keep learning, keep digging into new things, and get sharper at what she already does, staying in step with where the field is heading.
Bonus fact: Diandra’s stress relief is cooking, mostly the trial-and-error kind where the recipe is treated as a loose suggestion. And after years of not really being a music person, she’s recently started properly listening, trying to catch the small details most of us skip straight past. Which, when you think about it, is a very acoustician thing to do.