Conditions under Which Residual Sound in Reverberant Rooms May have More than one Rate of Decay
Architectural acoustics was placed on a scientific basis by the late Professor Wallace C. Sabine of Harvard University. Almost his first step was to establish experimentally the facts that “the duration of audibility of the residual sound is nearly the same in all parts of an auditorium;” that it is “nearly independent of the position of the source;” and that “the efficiency of an absorbent in reducing the duration of the residual sound is, under ordinary circumstances, nearly independent of its position.”1 As his statements imply, Sabine certainly did not expect these principles to hold under all conditions. But since he calculated the reverberation time from the time required for the sound to decay from its initial intensity to the threshold intensity his method could not bring to light the presence of more than one rate of decay, and thus he may not have been aware of this added exception to the idealizations he proposed.
- Print ISSN
- 0097-5834
- Published
- 1930-10
- Content type
- Original Research
- DOI
- 10.5594/J14778