Sabine’s 1898 formula made reverberation time the dominant auditorium design parameter

Evidence

Because of the importance of reverberation time in the perception of music in a room, and because of the differing requirements for speech and different types of music, much effort is focused on it. In fact a major step in room acoustics occurred when Wallace Clement Sabine enumerated a means of calculating, and so predicting, the reverberation time of a room in 1898. Much design work on auditoria in the first half of this century focused almost exclusively on this one parameter, with some successes and some spectacular failures. Nowadays other acoustical and psychoacoustical factors are also taken into consideration. — David Howard, Jamie Angus, coustics and Psychoacoustics, 1858

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• SHARE: Good tidbit for architectural designers who still default to RT60 as the single spec.

Related

• Sabine’s 1898 equation launched scientific room-acoustics design. (similarity 0.93)
• Sabine’s formula launched the science of architectural acoustics (similarity 0.88)
• Sabine’s reverberation formula founded architectural acoustics but fails for high absorption (similarity 0.87)
• Sabine experimentally verified exponential sound decay in a reverberant room (similarity 0.87)
• No reverberation-time formula has universal applicability across rooms (similarity 0.86)
• Recommendable reverberation times range from 2 seconds down to 0.35 seconds by room type (similarity 0.86)
• Concert hall reverberation times range from one to two seconds (similarity 0.86)
• Listeners prefer reverberation times of 1-1.1 s for piano in living-room-sized spaces (similarity 0.85)
• Reverberation time depends on room volume and surface area, not absorption alone. (similarity 0.85)
• Reverberation times range from fractions of a second to ten seconds (similarity 0.84)
• The Sabine formula assumes diffuse sound that real rectangular rooms rarely produce (similarity 0.84)
• Identical reverberation times can mask drastically different room sizes and acoustics (similarity 0.84)
• The 60 dB reverberation metric is impractical in real listening conditions (similarity 0.83)
• Optimal reverberation and strength targets differ sharply by music type (similarity 0.83)
• The science of acoustics began with concert hall reverberation theory (similarity 0.83)

Broader Connections

• Sabine’s reverberation formula founded architectural acoustics but fails for high absorption #qualifies (0.85) — David M. Howard, Jamie Angus, Acoustics and Psychoacoustics, 1863
• Halls vary reverberation time by either adding volume or adding absorption #expands (0.80) — David M. Howard, Jamie Angus, Acoustics and Psychoacoustics, 1920
• Sabine experimentally verified exponential sound decay in a reverberant room #corroborates (0.80) — Eric J. Heller, Why You Hear What You Hear- An…, 2459
• No reverberation-time formula has universal applicability across rooms #qualifies (0.75) — Toole, Floyd E, Sound reproduction- the acoustics and…, 1249
• The Sabine formula assumes diffuse sound that real rectangular rooms rarely produce #qualifies (0.75) — Eric J. Heller, Why You Hear What You Hear- An…, 2491
• Recommendable reverberation times range from 2 seconds down to 0.35 seconds by room type #expands (0.75) — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 282
• Smaller rooms produce louder reverberant fields but shorter reverberation times #expands (0.75) — David M. Howard, Jamie Angus, Acoustics and Psychoacoustics, 1767