The Sound of Taipei 101 from the Roof

[seadragon]

Since Blair Kamin posted that article in the Chicago Tribune yesterday regarding the World's Tallest Building according to CTBU, here is the link:

http://featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com/theskyline/

I thought I’d post a link to a crude video that I took from the roof of Taipei 101.

This video was recorded on a rainy and windy day around the end of Nov in 2005. What is interesting about this video is the loud whistling sound that can be heard in the background. The sound comes from the tall metaphoric pagoda spire mounted on the roof of the building. Also noticeable is how the sound varies with wind speed.

It’s kind of neat in some ways for if the building operators were to place four strategically placed microphones on the spire along with a little signal processing software the spire itself could be turned into an accurate wind speed and direction measuring device.

A down side to the whistling is that a person can’t get away from it. Even when one stands in the corner section of the roof, because the spire is so large, the whistling sound produced on windy days is easily heard from all points on the roof. I did not have a wind speed measuring device with me, but from my experiences with having recorded winds speeds in the past as part of a daily routine, I would have guessed the winds to have been 10-20 mph.

The video file is 26 seconds long and 34 MB. Here is the link to the video:

http://bytepile.com/taipei101/

[Razqal]

man how annoying!! i hope somehow they can fix the whistling sound. i'd imagine that would drive most people nuts. no wonder that outdoor observation deck is always so empty!

[seadragon]

The whistling sound coming from the spire should not be too difficult to resolve as there are several approaches the operator of Taipei 101 could take. It’s going to depend more I guess on ease of access and how much money they want to spend on the problem.

None the less, the constant whistling on just moderately windy days is certainly a design oversight and a lesson buildings in the planning phase with venting spires can learn from. Since the spire designers had either miss calculated, never took the time or did not consider if the spire would resonate at audio frequencies is unfortunate, for what we have here is little more than a large musical flute mounted to the roof of Taipei 101.