Week 2 - Annotated Essay - Reverberation

Week 2 - Annotated Essay - Reverberation PDF (Click - Login)

The readings about reverberation from the book ‘Sonic Experience – A guide to everyday sounds’, describes the fundamentals of reverberation, and the effect it has in difference spatial surrounds. Reverberation in Sonic Experience is described by the time takes for the sound to decrease to 60DB (decibels – measure the intensity of sound), which is equivalent to the intensity of sound from a typical conversation. The measurement of reverberation time - RT60 is proportional with the volume of the room. When being placed in a room, you are able to determine “acoustic specificities” by analysing the RT60 curve.

This analysis can inform my own architectural practice in a way of understanding the built space, or unbuilt space. Architecturally speaking if I were to create a room for performance purposes such as a concert hall, I would need to think about the reverberant sound. In a concert hall the reverberant sound dies away over a period of time with the sound energy being absorbed by certain material interactions within that space. If I wanted to create a hall that would resonate throughout for a long period of time for an Opera I would need a more reflective room that would take longer for the sounds to fade away. This can be influenced by materials in the room which are good reflectors or are good at absorbing the sounds. In this example, good reflectors may be appropriate to get a longer reverberated time. Of course the reverberation time for any room should be proportional to intended use. So the reverberation time is the time it drops to 60 dB below original level expressed as RT60.

To determine what a good architectural reverberation time for a hall is, it is good to observe other examples of proficient halls, for example the New York, Carnegie Hall reverberation time is 1.7 seconds.

Bibliography:

• Reverberation Time, hyperphysics, Viewed 27 Junly 2012,
• Augoyard, Jean-Francois & Torgue, Henry, 2006, Sonic Experience – A Guide To Everydays Sounds, McGill-Queen’s University Press, London