Modern Architectural Acoustics’

Founding Father
Jump to Sabine’s Formula ↓
Wallace Clement

Sabine, born in 1868, is considered the father of architectural

acoustics. He attended Ohio State University where he studied
physics. He later went to Harvard to pursue his graduate
studies. After graduating, he joined Harvard as a faculty
member teaching physics. When it came to the study of sound,
Sabine never had any formal training. He became fascinated
with how sound differed from one lecture hall to another. Along
with his assistants, he began moving materials to different
lecture halls to see what materials made the lecture halls
sound better. Sabine and his assistants spent many nights
moving materials and measuring sound waves; he and his team
used an organ and a stop watch to measure the deterioration
of sound as it passed through the lecture hall.

In one instance, Sabine discovered that one person sitting in a

seat did as much to absorb sound as did six seat cushions.
One night he even moved all the seat cushions from one
lecture hall into another. He experimented with oriental rugs.
After working late each night, Sabine and his assistants would
restore the lecture halls back to their original form before
classes began the next day. Sabine’s greatest achievement
was to conclude that a relationship existed between the
surface quantity of absorption materials placed on walls,
seats, ceilings, and floors and the volume of the lecture hall.
The more sound absorbing materials he used, the quieter the
lecture became.

Sabine came up with a formula for determining the quality of

sound in a lecture hall, auditorium, concert hall, or any other
venue where people spoke or played music. In designing a
venue, as just described, engineers and architects need to
determine the sound reverberation time. Reverberation time is
the time it takes an original sound to drop sixty decibels.
Sabine chose sixty because the highest concert crescendo is
about one hundred decibels. Dropping it to forty decibels
would put it at normal room background noise.

Sabine came up with a formula that architects and engineers

could use when designing a concert hall so they could achieve
the best reverberation time for their particular venue.

Sabine found that 2 to 2.25 seconds was an optimal

reverberation time for a concert hall, and around 1 second was
optimal for a lecture hall. If a lecture hall had a reverberation
time of more than one second, students would have to contend
with multiple words at once.

The following are reverberation times for different concert

halls.
Boston Symphony Hall: 1.8 seconds
 Carnegie Hall in New York City: 1.7 seconds

Sabine’s Formula
Sabine’s formula is given by the following:
RT is the reverberation time (to drop 60 dB)
60

V is the volume of the room

c is the speed of sound at 20°C (room temperature)
20

Sa is the total absorption in sabins

The sabin unit has the same dimension as area (e.g. m ). A one
2

square meter surface with an absorption coefficient of 0.75

would be considered 0.75 sabins. The absorption coefficient
has a range of 0 to 1, where a coefficient of 0 indicates none
of the sound is absorbed, and a coefficient of 1 indicates that
100% of it is absorbed.
Since we know the speed of sound at 20°C is 343 m/s, we can
do a little math and reduce the formula to:

(Note that the factor 0.161 has the units seconds per
meter; dimensional analysis on the equation will yield a time
in seconds as the volume is measured in cubic meters and
sabins in square meters).
Let us use this formula to calculate the reverberation time of a
fictitious lecture hall. Let us say the hall has a 5-meter tall
ceiling, is 20 meters wide and 10 meters deep. Let us also say
that the absorption coefficient for the walls, ceiling, and floors
is 0.3.

To use Sabine’s Formula, we’ll first need the volume:

The total absorption, in sabins, is the total area times the

absorption coefficient. The total area in includes 4 walls, a
ceiling, and a floor, which when multiplied by the absorption
coefficient gives us the total absorption in sabins:
Let us use the dimensions of the room above, but specify
different absorption coefficients for the different surfaces. Let
us say the tile floor has a coefficient of 0.01, the ceiling a
coefficient of 0.5, and the 4 walls a coefficient of 0.2.

The total absorption in sabins becomes:

This is very close to one second, which is ideal for a lecture

hall.

In the examples above, we used the metric system, but if we

wanted to measure the room in feet, we would need to use the
speed of sound in feet per second (1125 ft/s). Doing so would
result in a different coefficient for Sabine’s formula:

(Note now the coefficient has the units s/ft. Here the sabin has
the units of ft and can be called the imperial sabin, as opposed
2

the metric sabin used in the previous examples).

Conclusion
The sabin, named in honor of Wallace Sabine, is a unit of
measure; one imperial sabin equals one square foot of 100%
absorbing material, and one metric sabin equals one
square meter of 100% absorbing material. Stemming from
Sabine’s 19 century work a new field of study was born. Today,
th

computer programs incorporate Sabine’s formula to help

engineers and architects model and design future concert and
lecture halls around the globe.