Room sound decay is exponential, appearing linear on a dB scale

Evidence

The decay of the sound energy is exponential, which is characteristic of many physical resonator systems (see Equation (2.8)), and corresponds to linear decay on a logarithmic decibel scale. — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 276

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the general physics of resonator decay in other domains — spring damping, capacitor discharge share the same exponential form.