Every commercial project that needs to hit Green Mark eventually lands on Leia’s desk. Two years ago she didn’t know what Green Mark was.
So how did you end up in acoustics?
Pure chance. Leia came across a trainee position at Soundzipper, applied, and got in with no real background in sound. What followed was a crash course in how acoustics actually works inside the built environment, which turned out to be a very different thing from how most people assume it works.
What were you doing before that?
She’s Singaporean, and she studied Architecture at Singapore Polytechnic from 2021 to 2024. Before Soundzipper, her working life was waiting tables part-time at an F&B spot for pocket money. This is her first full-time corporate job, and she walked in without much sense of what that was supposed to feel like.
What does a normal day look like now?
Green Mark, mostly. Leia’s job is to make sure a project meets the Green Mark standard, whoever the client happens to be, which means constantly checking against the latest version of the standard rather than the one everyone remembers from the last job. Most of her work sits on commercial projects. The rest of her day goes into coordination, moving between the design team, the client, the contractor and the supplier so everyone ends up building the same thing.
Which project are you proudest of?
Not a formal project, but Soundzipper helped out with the Audio Exotics show twice, and both times Leia built a 3D model of the space in SketchUp. It let the client see exactly what the venue would look like once the speakers went in, which made planning the show far less of a guessing game. The most recent one went down well, with a lot of good feedback on how the venue was set up. Getting to contribute using the skill she actually trained in was the part she liked best.
What’s the tricky part of the work right now?
She’s on a few projects she can’t name yet, and the payoff she’s waiting for is seeing them finished on site. That’s the most rewarding bit of the job. The hard part is managing expectations. An architect might be chasing a particular high-end look, so she’ll recommend suppliers who can deliver it. Then the main contractor comes back worried about lead time, sometimes when there’s genuinely enough runway. Sitting in the middle of that and getting everyone to a decision is its own skill, and not one she learned in school.
Best thing about the team?
She had no real reference point for what a corporate job should feel like, and the team never made her feel behind for it. Colleagues who were patient while she found her feet, on a standard she’d never even heard of a couple of years ago, made the difference between struggling through it alone and actually growing into the role.
What do people get wrong about acoustics?
Egg cartons. The belief that they’re a cheap and effective soundproofing fix. They’re not good at it, and soundproofing isn’t even what they’d be attempting to do in the first place.
Where do you want to be in a few years?
Still on projects like these, ideally. Designing studios is the one that sounds genuinely exciting to her.
Bonus fact: She dances three or four times a week after work, and she’s been hitting the gym alongside it to build the strength the dancing demands.