Twenty-five partitions, twenty-five different reasons sound was getting through. Finding each one meant testing every wall on the floor, not just the obvious ones.

Client Ace Kegan, for State Street Bank and Trust	Location Capital Tower, Singapore
Service Acoustic Testing & Construction Oversight	Completed 2022
Scope 6 Meeting Rooms, 5 Offices, Dealing Room & Trading Floor, Level 33

25

Partitions tested across the full floor, each with its own diagnosis of exactly where sound was getting through

18

Individual rectification items completed, each documented with before and after photographic evidence

5

Report revisions over five months, tracking the rectification process from diagnosis through to sign-off

The Situation

State Street Bank and Trust Company’s Singapore branch occupies Level 33 of Capital Tower, a floor built around six meeting rooms, five offices, a dealing room, and a trading floor area, alongside open-plan working space. Ace Kegan, the fit-out contractor, engaged Soundzipper to test the completed acoustic partitions across the floor. In a financial services office, sound isolation between meeting rooms and the dealing room carries real weight, since confidential client discussions and trading floor activity both need to stay contained to the room they happen in.

What We Found

Testing covered all 25 partitions across the floor, and the results told a consistent story: most partitions were falling short of typical office acoustic targets, and the reason was rarely the wall itself. Soundzipper identified the specific leakage path for every single partition tested. The most common cause, found across roughly a third of the tested partitions, was the drop seal on glazed corridor doors not sealing correctly against the floor. Several operable walls between meeting rooms were leaking at the top right corner where the panel met the ceiling. A number of partitions had holes above the partition head, left open into the ceiling void, providing a direct path for sound to travel between rooms. Air grilles were a further recurring issue, in some cases carrying sound between spaces through a shared or unsealed return air path. This partition-by-partition diagnosis is what made the difference between a report that just says a wall failed and one that tells the contractor exactly what to fix.

What We Did

Working from the partition-by-partition diagnosis, Soundzipper issued rectification instructions for each identified leakage path. Ace Kegan carried out the work over the following months: drop seals were adjusted on glazed doors across multiple meeting rooms, holes above partition heads were patched, and gaps at operable wall corners were addressed. Eighteen individual items were rectified in total, each documented with before and after photographs supplied by the contractor. The report went through five revisions over five months as the rectification progressed, with Soundzipper tracking each fix against the original diagnosis. This is the kind of project where the value isn’t a single test number, it’s the process of finding twenty-five different reasons why sound might be getting through a wall, and closing each one individually rather than treating the floor as a single problem to solve.