Click on the links below to listen to seats with different reverberation times.
Rooms with shorter reverberation times are more conducive to speech intelligibility, whereas most music sounds better if played in a space with a slightly longer reverberation time.
We have included auralizations of both Dvorak’s String Quartet No. 12 and of regular speech. As you listen, notice which recordings sound better at which reverberation times.
Dvorak’s String Quartet No. 12
Anechoic (Dry) Recording
RT = 0.46 sec
RT = 1.47 sec
RT = 2.10 sec
5. RT = 7.67 sec
Speech
Anechoic (Dry) Recording
RT = 0.46 sec
RT = 1.47 sec
RT = 2.10 sec
RT = 7.67 sec
Creating the Auralizations
The Method:
Reverberation time of a room can be controlled by changing the size or the materials of the room. To create the auralizations above, we used a computer model of one simple room resembling a concert hall. To change the reverberation time of the room, we changed only the materials, not the size. Seat location should have little effect on reverberation time (assuming an even diffuse field), so we used the same seat for all the auralizations (unlike the Intimacy Auralizations).
The longest reverberation time was created by making all the walls out of wallpapered plaster and the audience floor was simply wooden chairs on a hard floor. The room with the shortest reverberation time had cotton curtains on all the walls, an audience seated in heavily cushioned chairs, and acoustic paneling on the ceiling.
Of course, the sound with the shortest value of RT is the anechoic recording, which exhibits no reverberation whatsoever.
The Model:
Some auralizations on this site were created in Odeon using computer models of existing concert halls, such as Elmia or Concertgebouw. However, most of these halls have more than one hundred different surfaces, and to change the materials on all of these surfaces would be impractical. For that reason, we used a simplified version of a concert hall. This computer model had only ten different surfaces, whose materials could quickly be changed to give the desired reverberation times.
The same room was used to create the Warmth and Brilliance Auralizations.
All auralizations created using the Odeon Room Acoustics Software.
Back to Reverberation