Abstract
Prior to Sabine’s work on the Fogg Art Museum and Boston Symphony Hall, several numerical guidelines had been developed and applied to the design of rooms with specific acoustic demands such as theatres, concert halls, and opera houses. Previous papers have discussed guidelines based on the following principles: voice directivity, which was employed in the design of at least 11 rooms; “echo theory”, which quantifies the perception threshold between direct sound and first order reflections in order to prevent echoes from occurring, aiding in the design of at least 7 rooms and leading to the first known use of an acoustic scale model; and notions of reverberation, which influenced the design of at least 14 rooms. This paper discusses three additional pre-Sabine numerical guidelines that were used in room acoustic design: (1) audience rake, (2) stage acoustics and proscenium design, and (3) length, width, and height ratios. The origin of these theories, as well as examples of rooms in which they were applied, are discussed and compared to current practices in room acoustic design.
Highlights
With the proposal of the reverberation time formula in 1898, Wallace Clement Sabine was the first to describe an objective and quantifiable relationship that could be used in architectural acoustics design [1]
Five of the six historic theories discussed are still employed in current room acoustic design
From the three theories presented in this study, two are still employed in an almost unchanged form in current room acoustic design—the audience rake is determined as it was in the 19th century and is even codified in standards, while the room acoustic design of surfaces in the stage area of proscenium theatres and opera houses is still an important consideration in room acoustic design
Summary
With the proposal of the reverberation time formula in 1898, Wallace Clement Sabine was the first to describe an objective and quantifiable relationship that could be used in architectural acoustics design [1]. At the end of the 18th century numerical guidelines were developed based on geometrical acoustics [8,9] This so-called “echo theory” was based on a quantification of the perception threshold between direct and reflected sounds. Geometrical studies based on “echo theory” during the design process had a slight positive influence on the room-acoustics; they could not prevent the poor acoustic results due to sound concentrations caused by numerous curved surfaces. One can state that historic voice directivity guidelines concerned the direct sound and that “echo theory” considered early reflections. These theories ignored the late arriving reflections or reverberation.
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