EP275 The Sound of Better Buildings with Kieren McCord (May 2026)

Quotes from the episode:

“The tighter your envelope, the more attention you have to pay to ventilation and indoor air quality.”

“The acoustics of the ordinary rarely gets attention.”

“There’s so much good work being done, so much data being collected, and oftentimes it doesn’t leave the hard drive.”

“Noise annoyance may be one of the things people are most passionate about.”

In this episode of the Building HVAC Science Podcast, Bill Spohn welcomes Kieren McCord, a research scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, for a conversation about indoor environmental quality, acoustic comfort, and the often-overlooked benefits of building performance upgrades. Kieren shares her path from music and acoustics to building science, explaining how sound, comfort, air quality, thermal resilience, and human perception intersect in homes.

The conversation explores how energy upgrades such as better windows, tighter envelopes, and improved insulation can create benefits beyond lower utility bills. Kieren explains how acoustic performance is measured, why low-frequency sound is difficult to block, how decibel weightings like dBA and dBZ work, and why human response to noise can be highly personal. She also discusses the promise and limitations of smartphone-based sound measurements, including the potential for making acoustic data collection more accessible to HERS© raters and home performance professionals.

Kieren also shares details from recent field research on a Chicago window retrofit, in which triple-pane acoustic windows and careful installation resulted in a 35% reduction in whole-home air leakage. While the noise data is still being processed, the study aims to link measurable building improvements to homeowners' perceptions of comfort, quiet, smell, temperature, and overall livability. Her closing message is a call for more shared field data, more collaboration, and a stronger connection between academic research and the practical work being done every day by contractors, raters, and building performance professionals.

Kieren’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kieren-m/

US DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information; osti.gov

Physical Phone Experiments: https://phyphox.org/

This episode was recorded in May 2026.