Singapore Airlines trains its cabin crew and pilots here. Every room in this building sounds the way it does because someone calculated what it needed to sound like first.
| Client Ong & Ong (for Singapore Airlines) | Location Airline Road, Singapore |
| Service Acoustic & AV Consultancy | Completed 2025 |
| Certification BCA Green Mark 2021 | |
40+
Rooms across three floors, each with an individual acoustic target calculated and verified — classrooms, VR simulation rooms, a town hall, meeting rooms, and more
0.58s
Designed reverberation time in the Town Hall — within the sub-0.8 second target for clear speech across a large assembly space
2 Services
Green Mark acoustic design and AV consultancy, integrated from the outset rather than treated as separate scopes
The Situation
Singapore Airlines’ Staff Training Centre at Airline Road is where the airline trains cabin crew, pilots, and ground staff. The Annexe is a new addition to that facility — three floors of purpose-built training spaces covering a wide range of programme types: a town hall for large all-hands sessions, multiple classroom types, VR and simulation training rooms, resource rooms, meeting rooms, break rooms, a canteen, a Kris Shop, nursing rooms, and a prayer room. Ong & Ong engaged Soundzipper to provide both the Green Mark 2021 acoustic design and the audiovisual consultancy for the building, covering everything from facade noise ingress through to the AV systems in individual classrooms. For a building where the quality of training delivered inside directly affects the airline’s service standards, having every room designed to perform acoustically was not optional.
What We Found
Acoustic modelling across the full building identified a diverse set of requirements that varied significantly by room type and function. The VR and simulation training rooms required the tightest reverberation control of any space in the building, with a target below 0.5 seconds — necessary for voice clarity during immersive simulation exercises where a trainee needs to hear instructions without reflections from the room interfering. Standard classrooms required below 0.7 seconds. Meeting rooms and consultation rooms required below 0.6 seconds. The Town Hall, the largest single space in the building at over 400 m², required below 0.8 seconds to ensure speech intelligibility across the full audience area. A room-by-room compliance review revealed that certain spaces in the preliminary design — including Resource Room Type 2, the main lobby, several server rooms, and dining areas — would not meet their targets without additional acoustic treatment. Resource Room Type 2 was the most significant case: with absorptive material only on the floor, the designed RT was 1.60 seconds against a 0.7 second target, with flutter echo risk also flagged.
What We Designed
Soundzipper provided individual RT calculations for every room type across all three floors, specifying the ceiling, wall, and floor treatment combinations required to bring each space within its target. For the Town Hall, the design achieved an RT of 0.58 seconds. For classrooms, designed RT values ranged from 0.29 to 0.39 seconds. VR simulation rooms achieved 0.37 seconds. Meeting rooms reached 0.20 to 0.25 seconds. In each non-compliant space identified during the design review, specific recommendations were issued: acoustic wall treatment on at least two non-parallel walls and ceiling treatment for Resource Room Type 2, ceiling treatment for lobbies and dining areas, and updated specifications wherever the preliminary design would have fallen short. Facade noise calculations were produced to address external noise ingress and confirm the building envelope performance. The AV consultancy ran in parallel across four phases — design development, tender, construction review, and testing and commissioning — ensuring that every speaker, display, and signal distribution system was specified with the room’s acoustic performance in mind. The result is a training building where a Singapore Airlines instructor can be heard clearly from any seat in any room, from the town hall to the smallest consultation space.