Sitting in a corner amplifies your voice through reflected wall images

Evidence

It helps to back into a corner with reflecting walls if you want your voice to carry. In practice, the sound emanating from a cubical corner may not have the full factor of 82 = 64 times the energy in it, because (1) the walls and floors are not 100% reflective, (2) the sound from speech isn’t quite as loud behind the speaker or to the side as it is in front, (3) the speaker’s head is probably not very close to the floor, and (4) higher frequencies will not receive the same enhancements since they violate the 1/8 wavelength rule. Nonetheless, if you want to be heard better, and also to hear better (due to the law of reciprocity, discussed in section 7.5, it works both ways), sit in a corner! — Eric J. Heller, Why You Hear What You Hear- An…, 519

Categorization

• CANDY: A practical, quotable tip — back into a corner to project your voice, useful at a party or lecture.
• SHARE: This is the kind of concrete acoustics nugget worth sending to a singer, public speaker, or acoustician friend.