A childcare nap room, a judo class, and a music room are about to share a building. Here’s how we’re making sure none of them notice the others.

Client Architects Project Group	Location Havelock Road, Singapore
Service Acoustic Design	Status Design Finalised
Certification BCA Green Mark 2021

3 Storeys

Childcare, judo, music, multipurpose halls and care facilities, all sharing party walls

5 Design Revision

Completed with the architect before the report was finalised

HW2.3

Green Mark sound zoning and interior acoustic comfort requirements, built into the design from day one

The Brief

Architects Project Group engaged Soundzipper during the design stage of the Kim Seng Community Centre renovation at 570 Havelock Road. The building is being reconfigured to bring together a genuinely wide mix of programmes under one roof: a childcare centre, a judo room, a music room, multipurpose function halls, an office, and care facilities, several of which share walls or sit on the same floor. The renovation includes demolishing existing walls and adding new rooms and partitions, which meant the acoustic strategy had to be built into the architecture from the start rather than fitted around it later. The project is targeting BCA Green Mark 2021 certification, with acoustic performance assessed under section HW2.3, covering both sound zoning and interior acoustic comfort.

The Challenge

A community centre like this one is, in effect, several very different buildings stacked together. A judo room generates impact noise. A music room generates sustained mid-to-high frequency sound. A childcare centre needs near-total quiet during nap periods and clear speech intelligibility the rest of the time. Multipurpose halls need to support anything from quiet meetings to lively events. None of these can be allowed to bleed into the others, and the site itself sits within a residential area next to apartment buildings and a pre-school, which set its own constraints on noise leaving the building. Soundzipper’s noise survey assessed both the external context and the relationships between every internal room type, identifying which adjacencies carried the highest risk of sound transfer.

The Design

Soundzipper’s acoustic design report set internal noise level and reverberation time targets for every room type in the building, then worked through the construction detail required to achieve them. Wall types were specified room by room, with vibration isolation built into drywall partitions to stop structure-borne noise from one space reaching the next. Acoustic floor treatment was specified to control impact noise from the judo room. Duct lining and break-out noise control were addressed for the building’s air conditioning, and every pipe and wall penetration was given a treatment to prevent these common but often overlooked weak points from undermining the rest of the design. Door design and internal glazing were specified to maintain acoustic separation without working against the architectural intent. The report went through five rounds of revision with the project architect over six months to align the acoustic strategy with the evolving floor plan, with the final version issued in November 2025. The building is now moving into tender and construction, with the acoustic specifications built directly into the contractor’s scope of work.