Government Auditorium Acoustic Treatment Chennai | Perforated Wooden Panels | HillPoint

A government building in Chennai has an auditorium that does not look like most government buildings. Perforated wooden paneling runs across every wall surface and the ceiling, LED strips trace every panel edge, and the room is designed for unamplified speech to reach the last row.

That last part matters. The space hosts investor presentations, government briefings, and panel discussions. When the acoustic requirement is speech first, the room has to work without a sound system doing most of the heavy lifting. Speech clarity at distance, with minimal reverberation and no overlapping echoes during Q&A, is the target.

Perforated panels suit this well. Sound passes through the holes in the wood surface and is absorbed by the material behind. The wood face keeps the room feeling warm rather than acoustically dead. Ceiling panels handle vertical reflections; wall panels handle the lateral ones. The darker strips visible in the close-up photos are not decorative - they mark where panels of different density meet, which is part of how the absorption is distributed across the frequency range.

The lighting integration was probably the most coordination-intensive part of the project. LED strips run along every panel edge, which means the acoustic panels and the electrical work had to go in together. You cannot install the panels first and add lighting later - the edge detail will not work. On a government project timeline, sequencing those two trades without delay took some planning.

HillPoint manufactured the panels at its Tamil Nadu facility and handled installation on site.