While mass timber construction has become an important part of reducing the carbon footprint of the built environment, it continues to present challenges in meeting the sound isolation required by NBC 2015 when used in multi-family residential construction.  While there is often a desire to keep the timber structure exposed within the units, there is limited data available which describes the effect of structure-borne sound flanking through this condition.

This presentation will give an overview of measurements taken in a two-storey mock up of a modular mass timber building system.  Most timber in the mock-up structure was encapsulated, with the exception of the timber beams and the interior face of the mass timber façade panels.  Measurements were taken of the structure-borne sound flanking path through the exposed timber façade panels (K_ij) as well as the ASTC between floors.  A comparison will be made between the measured ASTC (ASTM E336) and the ASTC predicted using the measured K_ij values and the ISO 12354 method.