ES-III ASSIGNMENT

Yash Raval
19bar035

Auditorium acoustics

Significance of Auditorium acoustics -

The purpose of room acoustical design is to control the propagation,

reflection and attenuation of sound within a space
• Direct sound
• Reverberant sound (reflections)
• Useful and harmful reflections
• Sound attenuation and absorption, diffusion
Design goals according to the use of space, for example
• Good speech distinction
• Appropriate reverberation and sense of space in the audience,
stage acoustics which support music making
Significance of room acoustics –

Auditorium acoustical design

• Design of sound reflections
• Design of sound absorption
• Design of the shape and geometry of the space
Auditorium acoustical design ≠ maximising the amount of sound
absorbing material
• E.g., in a lecture hall the performer must be able to speak
without restraining one’s voice and so that the audience can
distinguish what is being said. Need for both sound absorbing
and reflecting surfaces!
Successful Auditorium acoustics is, thus, a combination of the
geometry of the space and the absorptive and reflective properties
of materials

Size of the Auditorium -

In any room, size has an important influence on acoustics. Size

includes the length, width and height of the room. Larger and smaller
auditoriums come with their own acoustical advantages.

For instance, a small room generally won’t allow music to ring out at
richly as it will in a large room. When it comes to volume, you’ll have
an easier time getting the whole audience to hear clearly in a small
room, while a larger auditorium can pose some volume challenges.
This is why you need the other aspects of a large room to contribute
to good acoustics and why you need a quality sound system.

Shape of the Room –

Like size, the shape of your auditorium will play an important role in
determining the acoustics. This is why it’s feasible to have a
computer program that can reconstruct a room’s geometry based
solely on the input of one sound emission. Auditoriums come in
many different shapes, though you won’t see some shapes as often
because they’ve proven to be poor for acoustics.

Generally, you want to avoid square rooms or narrow, rectangular

rooms since the parallel walls can cause sound waves to bounce back
and forth continuously — creating undesirable reverberations that
muddy the overall sound clarity. This is why many auditoriums have
more of a fan shape. Some auditoriums also feature curved walls,
which help diffuse sound. In addition to the general shape of a room,
other architectural features like the ceiling pitch and structures in
the room will affect the way sound waves behave in the space.

Materials in the Room -

A common problem in auditoriums is reverberation, which occurs

when sound waves bounce off surfaces and congregate. If you’ve
ever attended a lecture where the speaker’s voice echoed and made
it difficult to understand what they were saying, you’ve experienced
the issue of excessive reverberation. Some level of reverberation is a
good thing, especially when it comes to musical performances, since
otherwise the room will feel acoustically dead.

In a general-purpose auditorium where you want speech to sound

clear and music to sound rich and full, the ideal reverberation time
— the time it takes a sound to die away — is around 1.5 seconds to
2.5 seconds.

For most auditoriums, the reverberation time will be too long unless
there are sound-absorbing materials throughout the room. This
includes acoustic panels, upholstered chairs, curtains and other soft,
porous surfaces. If your auditorium is full of surfaces that are hard
and nonporous, like windows or wood floors, these materials will
reflect sound waves and contribute to higher levels of reverberation.