Auditory expectation of reverberation is calibrated against visual room size.

Evidence

The time taken for reverberation to occur is a function of the size of the room and will be shorter for smaller rooms, due to the shorter time between reflections and the losses incurred on each impact with a sur­ face. In fact the time gap between the direct sound and reverberation is an important cue to the size of the space that the music is being performed in. Because some of the sound is absorbed at each reflection it dies away eventually. The time that it takes for the sound to die away is called the reverberation time and is dependent on both the size of the space and the amount of sound absorbed at each reflection. — David Howard, Jamie Angus, coustics and Psychoacoustics, 1776 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim
• XREF: connects to: Vision and sound expectations must concord for convincing audio-scene perception; Identical reverberation times can mask drastically different room sizes and acoustics; Matching audio to a visual scene requires scene-appropriate impulse responses. (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• The gap between direct sound and reverberation encodes the perceived size of a space #corroborates (0.80) — David Howard, Jamie Angus, coustics and Psychoacoustics, 1776