A three node -displacement based- acoustic element is developed. In order to avoid spurious rotational modes, a higher order stiffness is introduced. This higher order stiffness is developed from an incompatible strain field which computes element volume changes under nodal rotational displacements fields. The higher order strain resulting from the incompatible strain field satisfies the Individual Element Test (IET) requirements without affecting convergence. The higher order stiffness is modulated, element by element, with a factor. As a result, the displacement based formulation presented on this paper is capable of placing the spurious rotational modes above the range of the physical compressional modes that can be accurately calculated by the mesh.