Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna: an exhibition is opened. The location: a large, reverberant room with an exciting industrial character, but very poor room acoustics. But today something is different. The laudator pauses. The reverb - the echo is gone today. She doesn't have to shout to be understood.

What had happened? Instead of tables have the exhibition organizers Hemp insulation boards used. And so in the room were not only sound-hard surfaces such as plaster and glass, which reflect sound unchecked, but also the "soft" natural fibers.

It quickly became clear to us that in the cavities of the hemp panels the sound "breaks". More precisely, part of the sound energy is converted into heat, which means that less sound is reflected back - there is less echo. This increases speech intelligibility in the room and makes the speech more understandable for the listener, because the reverberation of the words has the effect of several people talking at once.

After this exciting event in Vienna we understood one thing: The hemp panels swallow sound - and quite natural, without having to use artificial mineral fibers.