The room acoustics of gymnasium building

Abstract

This paper discusses the room acoustics of a gymnasium building, which is to accommodate more than 5000 spectators for various indoor sports such as volleyball, basketball, tennis and badminton. When a sound is generated in a space, the listener first hears the sound via the direct path from the source. Shortly afterwards, the listener hears its reflections off the walls, which are attenuated. Each reflection is turn further delayed and attenuated as it is reflected again and again. This results in the total reverberation of the sound. A gymnasium space can be highly reverberant due to the large space volume, coupled with an abundance of hard surfaces. Some designers frequently overlook the need for reverberation control in gymnasiums and other large spaces. The high level of reverberation promotes a high noise level that interferes with speech intelligibility, thus degrading the primary functions of the spaces. Moreover, additional functions, such as student assemblies, community meetings, or music performances, which are very common in the large spaces, will suffer severely from the excessive reverberation. This case study deals with mid-frequency reverberation times of about 7 s. Renovation treatments to control the reverberation are developed using computer models.