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🪵 The Threshold

Diffuse surfaces make room acoustics degrade gradually away from the sweet spot

Properties1
tagsja-picks, causal_relationships, singleton, xref, definitional_content

2 min read

Diffuse surfaces make room acoustics degrade gradually away from the sweet spot

Evidence

Diffuse surfaces, on the other hand, scatter sound in other directions than the specular. In the case of an ideal diffuser, the scattered energy polar pattern would be in the form of a hemisphere. A simple approach to calculating the effect of this can be to model the scattered energy as a source whose initial intensity is given by the incident energy. — David M. Howard, Jamie Angus, Acoustics and Psychoacoustics, 2318 (#expands, via linked claim)

Another name for these standing waves in a room is resonant modes, and the frequencies at which they occur are known as “modal frequencies.” Because the modes are spatially static, there will be a strong variation of sound pressure level as one moves around the room, which is undesirable. — David M. Howard, Jamie Angus, Acoustics and Psychoacoustics, 1953 (#qualifies, via linked claim)

If a steady tone, such as an organ note, is played in the space then after a period of time the reverberant sound will reach a constant level because at that point the sound power input balances the power lost by absorption in the space. This means that the steady-state level will be higher in rooms that have a small amount of absorption, compared with rooms that have a lot of absorption. — David Howard, Jamie Angus, coustics and Psychoacoustics, 1781 (#responds-to, via linked claim)

Categorization

  • XREF: connects to: Room sound homogeneous decay holds for typical rooms but can be engineered away; Walls must be rough on many scales to scatter sound diffusely; Diffusers mainly attenuate specific reflections rather than create diffuse fields — Toole, Floyd E, Sound reproduction- the acoustics and…, 1257 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

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