Acoustic Metasurfaces Are Entering Your Next Brief

On 30 May, Björk opened Echolalia at the National Gallery of Iceland, a Reykjavík Arts Festival exhibition built from three large-scale installations. Its centrepiece, Sorrowful Soil, threads a nine-part choral work through thirty individual Genelec speakers, each one carrying a single voice from the Hamrahlíð choir, positioned so precisely that sound and architecture behave as one object. That is one way to control exactly where sound goes. 

Acoustic metasurfaces — materials engineered to redirect sound rather than simply absorb it — are a quieter, more commercially consequential way of doing the same thing, and they are arriving in ordinary buildings rather than galleries. 

Let’s explore where the technology stands today and why specifiers should start paying attention.

Panels and baffles work by absorption. Soft, porous surfaces convert sound energy into small amounts of heat, which is why acoustic treatment has traditionally meant thicker walls, more foam, or more surface area. A metasurface takes a different route. Thin, patterned structures bend and cancel specific sound waves the way a shaped lens bends light, without needing power, electronics, or added mass.

Gianluca Memoli, the University of Sussex researcher behind one of the clearest commercial examples of this technology, has described the principle in a single line: “Like noise-cancelling headphones, but without electronics.” The distinction matters commercially as much as it does physically. A material that manipulates wave behaviour rather than absorbing energy can be thinner, lighter, and in some cases transparent to air and light, none of which conventional treatment can offer.

Hybrid work has raised the acoustic bar on ordinary meeting rooms and open-plan floors well beyond what most existing treatment was specified to solve. 

Integrators hear the same complaints repeatedly: reflections off glass and hard flooring, sound spilling between zones that were never designed to be acoustically separate, and microphones picking up more of the room than the speaker. Adding panels addresses some of this, but panels absorb indiscriminately. They cannot direct wanted sound to a listener while cancelling unwanted sound three metres away, because that is a wave-manipulation problem, not an absorption problem. That gap is exactly where metasurfaces are starting to compete.

Picture a finance floor with six huddle rooms along one glass wall, or a hospital corridor where a nurses’ station needs to stay audible without broadcasting patient conversations into the waiting area next door. Conventional treatment can soften both spaces. It cannot draw a precise boundary around where sound is and is not allowed to travel, because absorption has no concept of direction. A material that behaves like a lens for sound, rather than a sponge, can.

Metasonixx, spun out of the universities of Sussex and Bristol in 2019, is the clearest evidence that this has moved beyond journals. The company's acoustic metamaterial panels won the Institute of Physics Business Award in 2024 for noise reduction and ventilation applications in offices and hospitals, work that grew out of a widely cited British Medical Journal study estimating that around 40% of hospital patients are troubled by noise at night.

Since September 2023, Metasonixx has been installing desk separators built on the same technology in offices across the UK, Italy, France, and the United States. The company has also worked with Movyon, the research arm of Autostrade per l’Italia, on an outdoor noise-containment trial along an Italian motorway, and by late 2024, organisations including QINETIQ, Chevron, and Autostrade Italia had begun testing the panels more broadly, well beyond the hospital wards the technology was originally built for. 

The company’s route to market has been unglamorous by design: several UK research and innovation grants funded the early physics, an earlier prototype won the Armourers & Brasiers Venture Prize before the IOP award followed, and the current product line grew out of hospital-noise research rather than an AV brief at all. That history matters for a specifier weighing it up. This laboratory result took several years to become something with a price and a delivery date.

The containment side of the same physics is being tested independently at Penn State, where acoustics professor Yun Jing and doctoral candidate Jee Woo Kim published a study in IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics in May, demonstrating a 3D-printed metasurface that attaches to a parametric array loudspeaker and focuses audible sound into a zone a little over an inch wide.

Parametric speakers that beam sound directly at a listener already exist commercially, from companies including Soundlazer and Akoustic Arts, and are used in settings such as museums and broadcast studios. Their limitation has been that the beam scatters once it strikes a wall or ceiling. As Kim put it, “the sound can reflect all around the room, compromising privacy.” The metasurface attachment is designed to fix that, as well as a second longstanding problem: parametric speakers have historically struggled to reproduce bass. 

No manufacturer has attached its name to the Penn State work yet, so for now it serves as evidence of where the field is heading rather than a product ready to specify. Taken together, however, these two developments suggest growing momentum around acoustic metasurfaces, even if commercial adoption remains at an early stage.

There is no established test standard for metasurface panels equivalent to the sound absorption coefficients that govern conventional treatment. Absorption coefficients exist because absorption is a single, measurable property. A metasurface’s performance depends on frequency, angle of incidence, and the specific geometry it was designed against, which makes a single published rating harder to produce and harder to compare between manufacturers. 

Until a testing body publishes a comparable method, claims from any supplier in this space, including the ones named here, should be treated as manufacturer figures rather than independently verified ratings. Not yet, anyway.

None of this sits inside the existing acoustic-treatment procurement route. The supplier base is also small: Metasonixx is a six-person company, not a manufacturer with distribution across Europe, and Penn State’s work has no named manufacturing partner yet. Because Metasonixx sells direct rather than through the usual distributor network, procurement looks different too: a direct conversation with the company, not a stock order through an existing acoustic-treatment account.

That’s a genuine constraint, not a reason to ignore the category. Early specification of an unfamiliar material always looks like this, before test standards and supply chains catch up to demand. The practical move for now is smaller: know that the category exists, know one name in it, and flag it as an option for briefs where conventional treatment is visibly failing to solve the problem, rather than promising a client a finished product that does not yet have a standard route to market.

The immediate consequence is not a new line item to add to a tender. It is that a materials category now exists outside the acoustic-treatment vendor list most specification work still relies on, and the businesses building it are university spin-outs and research labs rather than the panel and baffle manufacturers already on file. 

When a client or an architect first raises metasurface acoustic treatment on a premium fit-out, an education project, or a hospital brief, the specifier who already understands the difference between absorption and wave manipulation, and who to call about it, will look considerably more credible than one meeting the term for the first time in that meeting.

A hotel group briefing a lobby refurbishment, or a hospital trust scoping a new ward, is exactly the kind of client likely to have read about acoustic metamaterials somewhere else first. Being the specifier who can explain the difference between this and a conventional panel, and who has already made one phone call to find out what it costs, is a small advantage that costs nothing to build now and is expensive to build later.

This publication has touched this territory once already: last month’s European Pro AV news roundup mentioned the Björk installation and Metasonixx’s work in a single paragraph, alongside the same underlying question AVIXA has examined before in the context of how precisely-placed sound affects a listener. This is the fuller version of that story, and the one worth acting on.

Acoustic metasurfaces are not an upgraded acoustic panel. They are a distinct materials category, closer to lens design than to foam and fabric, and the businesses building it are university spin-outs, not your existing acoustic-treatment suppliers. Learn this name now, so a client’s question is not the first time you have heard it.