Room Acoustics

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Topic

• Room Acoustics: Reflection - Nature of reflection from plane, convex and concave surfaces, diffraction, Absorption,
Echoes, focusing of sound, dead spots, flutter echo. Room resonances, Reverberation - reverberation time (RT) calculation
using Sabine’s and Eyring’s formulae. Effect of RT on speech and music.

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Reflection Absorption Diffusion

These are the three basics in room acoustics

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• The sound you hear in a room is a combination of direct sound and indirect sound. Direct sound will come directly from your speakers while
the other sound you hear is reflected off of various objects in the room.

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Sound reflection
• These waves are created when sound is reflected back and forth between any two parallel surfaces in your room, ceiling
and floor or wall to wall.

• When a longitudinal sound wave strikes a flat surface, sound is reflected in a similar direction provided that the dimension
of the reflective surface is large compared to the wavelength of the sound.
• Note that audible sound has a very wide frequency range (from 20 to about 20000 Hz), and thus a very wide range of
wavelengths (from about 20 mm to 20 m).
• As a result, the overall nature of the reflection varies according to the texture and structure of the surface.
• porous materials will absorb some energy,
• rough materials tend to reflect in many directions—to scatter the energy, rather than to reflect it coherently.

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• Laws of Reflection of Sound :

• The reflection of the sound follows the law angle of incidence equals to the angle of reflection, called the law of reflection.
• The incident , the reflected and the normal wave all lie in the same plane.
• When a longitudinal sound wave strikes a flat surface, sound is reflected in a coherent manner provided that the
dimension of the reflective surface is large compared to the wavelength of the sound.

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Reflection of sound from rough surface

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Reflection from concave surfaces

Plane wave fronts of sound striking a concave surface tend to be focused to a point.

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Reflection of the sound from convex surface
• Sound waves reflected from convex surface are magnified and are considered bigger.
• Convex surface may be use with advantages to spread the sound waves throughout the room.

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Activity

• Take two pipes of the same length and arrange them on a table near a wall or metal plate. Keep a clock near the open end
of one pipe and try to hear the sound of the clock through the other pipe by adjusting the position of the pipe. Now
measure the angles of incidence and reflection. The lift the second pipe and try to hear the sound.
• You will see that the angle of incidence is equal to angle of reflection. The incident ray, the reflected ray and normal all lie
in the same plane.

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Diffraction of sound

Diffraction involves a change in direction of waves as they pass through an opening or around a barrier in their path.

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Sound Absorption
sound energy is absorbed by 'acoustically soft' materials that sound waves encounter, as opposed to being reflected by
'acoustically hard' materials.

Sound Absorption Coefficient

the fraction of sound energy absorbed by a material. It is
expressed as a value between 1.0, perfect absorption (no
reflection) and 0, zero absorption (total reflection). The
value varies with frequency and angle of incidence.
Sound Absorption Coefficient of 1 = 100% sound
absorption - for example an open window.

Or
the fraction of incident sound which is not reflected.

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Echo
• A sound or sounds caused by the reflection of sound waves from a surface back to the listener.
• To hear an echo clearly, the time interval between the original sound and the reflected sound should be at least 0.1s.

• Sonar is based on the concept of Echo. The device is attached to the ship at its base. Then the sound wave is originated
from the sonar. The sound wave travels to the bed of the sea, and is reflected from the sea bed and is received by the
sonar receiver. This distance traveled is equal to the depth of the sea. It is used to see the obstacle also. It consists of a
transmitter and a receiver.

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 • Flutter echo is an energy that’s trapped between two surfaces and the
angle that the sound enters between the two surfaces, let’s say a wall and
a speaker for a brief moment in time it becomes trapped there.
• So you get a series of reflections in short time signatures and then that
translates into energy moving across the room and if you have two
parallel surfaces, two side walls that are of the wrong dimension, you will
• •
get that pattern at that frequency going back and forth.
Flutter Echoes are produced by sound traveling quickly between two
parallel reflective surfaces.
• A partially treated room is normally to blame for Flutter Echo, wherein
two portions of walls, ceiling or floor are non-absorptive and face directly
at one another.

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•
Reverberation is the same as echo but the distance here is less. The distance between the
source of the sound and the obstacle by which it is reflected is less in Reverberation.
• The reflected wave reaches the observer in less than 0.1 second. Now as the delay in time
is less than the original sound is still in memory, the delay between perception of sound
and the original sound is very-very less.
• For example: Singing in the shower is an example of reverberation. The walls are close to us
and hence it is observed. Hence now the two waves are heard as a prolonged sound wave.

• Reverberation time: when the reverberation time is too high, the sound produced by the
speaker will persist for a long period of time.
• Similarly, when the reverberation time is low, sound dies quickly and becomes inaudible in
a short amount of time.
• In order to improve the sound, reverberation time of a hall should be increased to an
optimum value.

• How is an Echo Different from the reverberation?

Echo is when long distances are considered and reverberation is when short distances are considered. Echo is due to the
reflection of sound wave by obstacles or end points like wall etc.
• But Reverberation is due to the collection of reflection sounds from the surface which is enclosed completely.
example: Auditorium.
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Focusing of sound

Dead spots
This defect is an outcome of the formation of sound foci.
Because of high concentration of the reflected sound at a spot, there is deficiency of
reflected sound at some other points.
These points are know as dead spots, where sound intensity is so low that is insufficient for
hearing.

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Activity

• Every surface in a room does not have to be treated in order to have good room acoustics. Here is a simple method
of finding trouble spots in a room.
• Grab a friend to hold a mirror along the wall near a certain speaker at speaker height.
• The listener sits in a spot of normal viewing.
• The friend then moves slowly toward the listening position (stay along the wall).
• Mark each spot on the wall where the listener can see any of the room speakers in the mirror.
• These are the trouble spots in the room that need an absorptive material in place. Don't forget that diffusive
material can also be placed in those positions.

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Room resonance
• The word resonance comes from Latin and means to resound.
• Resonance only occurs when the first object is vibrating at the frequency of the
second object.
• Resonance occurs when a sound wave has the same frequency as the natural
frequency of an object.
• The sound will make the object with the same natural frequency to vibrate.

Room modes/resonance are the collection of resonances that exist in a room

when the room is excited by an acoustic source such as a loudspeaker.
They can be reduced by using rectangular rooms with dimensions related by simple
ratios.

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The pioneer of modern acoustics

• Acoustics has only been recognized as a specific science for just over a century.
• Wallace Sabine was an assistant professor of physics at Harvard at the time the university opened their new art museum.
Within this museum was a lecture hall (Fogg Hall), but it was found to be totally unusable for lectures because of the
terrible echo.
• Sabine was asked to investigate the behaviour of sound within the Fogg Lecture Hall in order to rescue the use of that
room, and thus the science of architectural acoustics was born.
• After making hundreds of measurements in various buildings at Harvard, Sabine discovered that the reverberation time, as
he called it, was related only to the volume of the room, and the absorbency of the materials on the room surfaces.
• Sabine’s equation for RT

Reverberation time
Speed of the sound at 20 degree Celsius.
Absorption in Sabine's
Volume of the room

• The reverberation time (RT) in seconds is proportional to the ratio of the room volume V (in cubic metres) and the total
absorption A of all the surfaces in the room. The constant of proportionality is based on the speed of sound, but for the
purposes of rooms at normal atmospheric pressure and temperature (20°C), 0.161 is an acceptable value.
• Eyring’s equation
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Eyring’s equation

Problems:

1. Let us say the hall has 5m tall ceiling, is 20m wide and 10m deep. Let us also say that the absorption coefficient for the walls,
ceiling and floor is 0.3
2. Far a room 8m long, 6m wideand 4m high determine the reverberation time using the Sabine equation and Eyring when
absorption coefficient for the floor is 0.02, for the wall 0.04 and 0.1 for the ceiling.

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Difference between Sabine and Eyring formulae
• When the room is live, both the results are
• When the room is dead, both the results are different.
• Sabine’s work for live room.
• Sabine’s doesn’t work for dead room i. e. rooms containing a lot of absorption.

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