Reverberation time determines whether a room feels dead or live

Evidence

Another aspect of the reverberant field is that sound energy entering it at a particular time dies away. This is because each time the sound interacts with a surface in the room, it loses some of its energy due to absorption. The time that it takes for sound at a given time to die away in a room is called the reverberation time. Reverberation time is an important aspect of sound behavior in a room. If the sound dies away very quickly, we perceive the room as being “dead,” and we find that listening to or producing, music within such a space is unrewarding. On the other hand, when the sound dies away very slowly we perceive the room as being “live.” A live room is preferred to a dead room when it comes to listening to or producing live music. On the other hand when listening to recorded music, which already has reverberation as part of the recording, a dead room is often preferred. — David M. Howard, Jamie Angus, Acoustics and Psychoacoustics, 1820

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines reverberation time as the time sound at a given moment takes to die away, and introduces the dead/live room vocabulary for perceived decay.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader interest in how silences are shaped by space; a live room’s lingering tail and a dead room’s abruptness are two different acoustic silences. — connects to: Sabine experimentally verified exponential sound decay in a reverberant room
• corroborated: 4 independent passages support this claim — David M. Howard, Jamie Angus, Acoustics and Psychoacoustics, 1820