Alan Fierstein has been featured in many articles in the New York Times. An excerpt from one appears below. Click here for links to the others.

Silencing the Sounds of the Noisy City

By JOSEPH GIOVANNINI
Published: March 22, 1984

Excerpt:

''Ninety percent of urban residential complaints are due to music and voices coming from a neighboring apartment, footfalls from people walking upstairs, and noise coming from the street and nearby commercial establishments,'' said Alan Fierstein, an acoustics consultant for a New York concern, Acoustilog.

Sounds are airborne or structure-borne or both. While trucks at a stoplight on an uphill avenue are an obvious source of noise that enters nearby buildings through windows, there are sounds of indeterminate origin that can travel many floors through pipes, ducts or a structure itself. Some sounds are easy to locate and reduce; others can be both tenacious and elusive, taking a complex path through a building. Silencing the roar of garbage down a chute adjacent to a line of bedrooms may require the services of an acoustics consultant.

''A flute is easier to deal with than a piano, and both are easier than dealing with drums,'' Mr. Fierstein said. ''Little can be done about the rumble of a subway coming up through the structure of a building. In general, high-frequency sounds present less difficulty than those of low frequency.''

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