Acoustical Engineering Editing and Proofreading Services

Noise disputes are decided on paper. A planning committee, an inspector or a court will never hear the sound in question; they will read an assessment written months earlier by someone who stood in a field with a sound level meter, and they will decide whether to believe it. The measurements are usually competent. What loses cases is the description of how they were taken.

We edit what acoustic consultants and noise engineers produce — noise impact assessments and planning support statements, baseline survey methodologies and measurement records, plant and industrial noise assessments, entertainment and licensing noise reports, road, rail and aircraft noise studies, building acoustics and sound insulation testing reports, room acoustics and auditorium design reports, vibration assessments and construction monitoring plans, noise management and mitigation schemes, expert evidence for appeals and hearings, condition wording and compliance monitoring proposals, and design guidance for architects and developers. Our editors work on the part of an assessment that decides whether the numbers count.

The baseline survey description is where an acoustic assessment stands or falls, and it fails through omission rather than error. A reader deciding how much weight to give a background level needs to know the conditions under which it was obtained, and most reports supply a date, a location and an instrument serial number. We write these so the measurement position is described as somebody could stand in it again — height, distance from the façade, what was between the microphone and the source, and why that position rather than another; so the survey period is justified against the noise it was meant to capture, since a background level taken on a Tuesday in August does not describe a residential street in term time; so weather is reported with the actual conditions and the wind direction relative to the source, because downwind and upwind measurements of the same plant differ enough to change a conclusion; so anything excluded from the data is named along with the reason, given that unexplained gaps invite the assumption that inconvenient periods were removed; and so atypical events are described rather than filtered silently. Assessments written this way are argued about on their conclusions instead of their method.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including survey data, client sites and unpublished findings. We are editors rather than acousticians, and we offer no view on measurement methodology, criteria or conclusions. What we can do is make the method survive a hostile reading.