NEOM is many things, depending on who you ask. A bold reimagining of urban life. An audacious bet on the future of infrastructure. A project that generates equal parts fascination and scepticism. What it has not been, until recently, is a subject for acoustic engineers.
That is starting to change. The Line, NEOM’s flagship linear city concept, presents noise control challenges that have very few precedents. An enclosed, car-free urban environment stretching 170 kilometres, housing up to nine million people, operating at multiple vertical levels, the acoustic implications of that design are profound, and they have not received anywhere near the attention that the architecture and infrastructure engineering have.
This is not a critique of the project. It is an observation that acoustic design at this scale, in this configuration, is genuinely novel territory. And for acoustic consultants, contractors, and developers working on Vision 2030 projects across Saudi Arabia, there are lessons here that apply well beyond NEOM itself.
The Specific Problem With Enclosed Urban Environments
In a conventional city, noise dissipates. Traffic noise radiates in all directions and loses energy with distance. Buildings scatter and absorb it. Wind disperses it. The outdoor acoustic environment is messy, but it is not contained.
In an enclosed urban structure like The Line, this does not happen. Sound generated at any point in the environment has nowhere to go except to bounce off the enclosing surfaces. Without deliberate acoustic treatment, the reverberation times inside a structure of this size and geometry would be extraordinary, the kind of acoustic environment that makes normal conversation difficult and crowd noise genuinely uncomfortable.
The engineering response to this is not mysterious: absorption, diffusion, and careful specification of surface materials throughout the build. What is unusual is the scale at which these decisions need to be made, and the degree to which acoustic performance needs to be integrated into the architectural brief rather than added as an afterthought.
Mechanical Systems Are the Bigger Issue
For a car-free city, The Line is going to be extremely loud underground. The high-speed rail system planned to run through the structure, connecting the ends of the 170 km city in around 20 minutes, generates significant noise and vibration. Underground rail noise is a well-understood engineering challenge, but the solutions (floating slab track systems, tunnel lining treatment, vibration isolation at the structure) need to be designed in from the beginning. Retrofitting vibration isolation to existing track is expensive and disruptive. Getting it right at the construction stage is comparatively straightforward.
The vertical transport systems, high-speed lifts, people movers, automated logistics, add to the mechanical noise load. In a conventional building, a noisy lift motor room is an occasional problem. In a structure where millions of people live in close proximity to continuous vertical transport, the cumulative noise from mechanical systems needs careful management across every level.
What NEOM Means for Acoustic Standards Across Saudi Arabia
Even if you are not working on NEOM itself, the project is changing expectations. Saudi Arabia’s construction market is watching the standards being set at the Kingdom’s most visible projects, and those standards propagate. Developers working on luxury residential towers in Riyadh, hospitality projects along the Red Sea, entertainment venues in Qiddiya, all of these are increasingly being asked to demonstrate acoustic performance rather than simply assuming it.
The Saudi Building Code has been progressively updated to include more explicit acoustic requirements, and the clients commissioning premium developments are becoming more sophisticated about what good acoustic design actually means. The NEOM project is partly responsible for this shift: when the world’s most ambitious construction programme puts noise control on the agenda, the rest of the market pays attention.
The Practical Takeaway for Vision 2030 Projects
For developers and contractors working on large-scale Vision 2030 projects, whether that is a giga-project like NEOM or a more conventional development in Riyadh or Jeddah, the message from projects like The Line is relatively consistent: acoustic design works best when it is integrated early.
A project at schematic design stage can accommodate acoustic requirements without significant cost impact. The same requirements applied at the construction documentation stage require compromises. Applied after construction, they require expensive retrofits. The decisions are roughly the same; the timing determines the cost.
Akcoustic works with developers, architects, and contractors across Saudi Arabia on both new-build and retrofit acoustic projects. If you are at an early stage on a Vision 2030 development and want to understand what acoustic compliance will require, getting that question answered now is considerably cheaper than getting it answered later.
