We’ve all been there — stopped at a light when a low-rider pulls up with a stereo so loud you’re certain your windshield will shatter. You roll up your window, but the bass keeps thumping through the glass. That low frequency is the hardest part of sound to muffle, and it’s not limited to car radios. Trains produce the same frequency.

Thankfully, a team of Old Dom-inion University researchers recently made some noise of its own by developing a concrete that limits such sound by deflecting it.

Bayshore Concrete Products Corp. turned to ODU for help when it was bidding for a $50 million project as material supplier for a New York air-rail project — an 8.7 mile-long light rail addition running from Manhattan to New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport. The Cape Charles manufacturer needed ODU’s help developing barriers to muffle noise. "The Port Authority and the project architect had laid constraints on Bayshore. ... The project was a no-go unless they could decrease the noise impact," says Oktay Baysal, ODU’s associate dean of the College of Engineering and Technology.

Project architects had mandated that the barriers be a maximum of four and a half feet. Meanwhile, the Port Authority for New York and New Jersey stipulated that the noise had to be 75 decibels or less at 50 feet from the center of the tracks.

Baysal says the goal was to shape the top surface of the barriers to deflect the sound trains produce. After eight months of research, the ODU team successfully tested a prototype using loudspeakers to imitate train noise.

Bayshore won the contract last spring, supplying 7,500 of the 8- to 10-foot long concrete barriers. The project is scheduled for completion in 2001 at an estimated $1 billion cost.

While the project had very specific objectives for the New York rail, the noise research could be useful if someday the commonwealth commits to a light rail system, Baysal says. His team will be ready.

Now if only they could do something about those blaring car stereos.