The Sound Conservation and Acoustical Quality of a Lecture Hall

By Nicholas Reinhart University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Physics 199 POM Professor Steven Errede The Physics of Music

I. Introduction The design of a room is probably one the most important parts of good acoustics. The purpose of the room and size must be taken into account when designing different types of lecture halls, opera halls, or theatres. The purpose of this project was to identify whether there was any correlation between frequency and the conservation of sound in a lecture hall. As sound travels away from a source in a theoretical perfect room with no walls, the wave of sound that is produced does not lose any energy. The wave spreads itself out and will travel forever.

As seen in Fig. 21 from The Acoustical Foundations of Music, the sound intensity is spread out over a larger surface area as the sound moves away from the source. This allows us to calculate the acoustic wattage of the source at any distance if we are given the intensity at that distance. In a perfect room with a perfect source, we could predict the sound pressure level at a given distance if we know the acoustic wattage of the

source. If this was the way that sound behaved in a concert hall, the person in the back of the concert hall would hear the orchestra the quietest. However, this model is not taking into account the reflections and absorptions of the walls, seats, people, instruments, carpet and other factors. The walls will reflect sound based on the material that they are made of and the angle they are from the source. This complicates the picture. The first sound that gets to the listener would be the sound directly from the source followed by the reflections of the sound from different walls and objects. At a short distance, this is essentially instantaneous because the speed of propagation of sound in air at 20C is 344 m/sec. When the sound is reflected, it hits the surface at some angle from the perpendicular of the surface, the angle of incidence. The angle of reflection is the same angle on the opposite side of the perpendicular. In this way, curves can be designed and are seen in several different types of concert halls to focus the sound towards the audience rather than being lost towards the top or back of the stage. The waves can also be diffracted through a hole or around and object, which will affect the intensity of a sound in a given room. As seen in Fig. 18 from The Acoustical Foundations of Music, the wave intensity and phase are affected by movement through an aperture or around an object. Since the wave is being reflected off of several objects and the phase of the wave is being changed by different objects, there is constructive and destructive interference of these waves. It essentially acts as two sources interfering with each other. If there is only one source, it could be interactions between the source of the sound and the reflection, or two reflections interacting. This interaction can be seen in Fig. 19.

II. Experiment I designed the initial experiment to see how the sound of a general area was affected due to differences in frequency. The idea was to see if there were certain areas in a lecture hall in which there was more or less sound than the theoretical yield of sound intensity in a room that had no walls. We chose ten points in the lecture hall plus one point to standardize the sound from. The ten points were the far left at the base of the stairs, the top of the left stairs (seat H1), the middle of the left seating area (seat E7), the top of the left middle stairs (seat H10), the middle of the middle seating area(seat E17), the center at the base of the middle seating area (seat A14), the top of the right middle stairs (seat H25), the middle of the right seating area (seat E30), the top of the right stairs (seat H41) and the far right at the base of the stairs. At each of these positions, we took sound pressure level readings using a digital sound level meter in decibels and measured the distance from the source. Our digital level meter had ranges of 30 to 130 decibels and a frequency range of 31.5 Hz to 8 kHz. A base reading was used to determine the background noise of the room. The source was an amplifier with a function generator. We used the function generator to make continuous waves at certain frequencies between 90 Hz and 4 kHz. We standardized the signal at each frequency making the reading on the level meter equal to 80 decibels for each frequency. At this distance from the source and having only one source, the interference seemed relatively negligible. We tested each spot at 90 Hz, 400 Hz, 1 kHz, and 4 kHz. We noticed that as we increased the frequency we could hear places where there was essentially no sound and there were places where the sound was

very intense. At 1 kHz, the places where sound was intense and sound was relatively low seemed to be less than a foot apart. At this point, we decided to take readings of seat E17 at several different frequencies with the level of each frequency being standardized to 80 decibels. We also tried taking readings at every seat in three different rows at a frequency of 800 Hz. At 800 Hz, the wavelength is a little less than 0.5 meters, which is about the width of a chair. We tried to see if there was any correlation between this wavelength and the level at each chair in a row. III. Data and Conclusions Below is a schematic drawing of the lecture hall. Since the room, was slightly asymmetrical, the results show differences in the nodes and antinodes of waves on each side.

Based on the data from the different frequencies at each spot, the trends with the data show that the higher the frequency, the quicker the drop off in sound level at any distance. The lower frequencies have higher conservation of sound level or possibly more constructive interference at every distance. The two graphs below represent the same data but one is labeled with distance and one is labeled with the positions. 400 Hz seemed to have higher readings towards the edges of the lecture hall also.
Frequency Relationship
90 80 70

Sound Level (dB)

60 50 40 30 20 10 0 1 4.66 5.55 6.72 8 9 Distance (m) 9 11.07 11.07 13.7 13.7 90 Hz 400 Hz 1 Kz 4 Kz

Frequency Relationship
90 80 70

Sound Level (dB)

60 50 40 30 20 10 0

90 Hz 400 Hz 1 Kz 4 Kz

Ce nte r

Le ft

Le ft 1H

Ri gh t Le ft C 25 en ter H Ri gh tC en ter

14 A Ce nte Le ft B r as eS Ri tai gh rs tB as eS tai rs 17 E Ce nte r

7E

Position

10 H

41 H

30 E

Ri gh t

Some of the readings of the rows showed a sine wave-like pattern in the highs and low readings. This could be due to the interference from the wall constructively interfering with the signal at one seat and destructively interfering with the signal at the adjacent seat. Here are a few of the results. However the rest of the graphs are available in the raw data section with the tables of data.
E Row Left Seats 70 60 50

Sound level (dB)

40 30 20 10 0 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 Seats from left aisle

G Row Left Seats

70

60

50

Sound level (dB)

40

30

20

10

0 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18

Seats from left aisle

C Row Right Seats 70 60 50

Sound level (dB)

40 30 20 10 0 0 2 4 6 Seats from left aisle 8 10 12

Frequency vs. Decibel Readings for seat E17

76 74
Sound pressure level (dB)

500 300

72 70 90 68 66 64 62 0 200 200

800 400

600

700 900

1000

400

600 Frequency in Hz

800

1000

1200

The results from the tests on seat E17 show similar trends as the initial tests. The predicted sound level without a room at a distance of 8 meters was 61.9 decibels. Each

of the readings showed that the level at E17 was higher than the predicted level without reflections and interference. Therefore sound is being conserved and some constructive interference is taking place at seat E17 for each frequency. A sine wave-like pattern arose from the sound level compared to the frequency at each level. The intensity increased as it neared 500 Hz, while following the sine wave pattern. A well designed room for conferencing and speaking is a room with a reverb time of less than 1 second. This room had little or no echo that could be noticed by the human ear. The data also shows that the room carries sound well at frequencies near those of the human voice. At high frequencies, the sound is lost by absorption or interference but at lower frequencies constructive interference occurs more frequently. Possible errors in data include the sensitivity of the sound level meter at high frequencies and the fact that we had to be in the room during testing which would cause interference and absorption in by our bodies. The data shows that there is a correlation between the frequency of a source and the conservation of sound and the nodes and antinodes of vibration in the room. IV. Special thanks and References References: http://www.bol.ucla.edu/~miksmith/archacoustics.htm Online lecture notes from Physics 199 POM, http://wug.physics.uiuc.edu/courses/phys199pom/199pom_lectures.html Backus, John, The Acoustical Foundations of Music. New York, W. W. Norton & Company. 1977. Special thanks to: Professor Steven Errede and Mengyao Liang

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