A room appearing to ring at many frequencies actually has only one dominant resonance.

Evidence

However, because the time resolution is a much-improved 40 ms, it is possible to see more of what is happening in the time domain. Notice in the circled area that what looked like a single decaying resonance in (a) is actually two adjacent resonances with the higher amplitude one decaying very quickly, leaving a higher Q but much lower amplitude one to ring longer. All the other resonances that looked so alarming in (a) can now be seen to decay into randomness very quickly. In fact, the room appears to have only one resonance with prolonged decay, and its amplitude is more than 10 dB down at the outset—not likely to be a dominant audible factor. — Toole, Floyd E, Sound reproduction- the acoustics and…, 955

Categorization

• QUESTION: Curious how well psychoacoustic models predict audible salience of a resonance 10 dB down at onset versus closer-to-threshold resonances.