Acoustics is the science of sound and its distribution in a room. It is a complex fact, which often builds on insights from physics. When we talk about acoustics, it is often about speech intelligibility and sound quality in a particular environment. When there is no optimal sound, we speak of reverberation and poor acoustics. We would like to explain the most important concepts (sound and reverberation time).
A sound source causes changes in air pressure that travel in a wave motion through air. When such a sound wave reaches the eardrum, it is vibrated according to the frequency of the sound wave.
In most cases this is in the air (air noise: the human voice, TV and HiFi devices, musical instruments, …), but these vibrations can also propagate through contact surfaces (contact noise: high heels, a slamming door, a knocking hammer, scratches on a board, …).
Sound can be heard by people or animals with an organ of hearing when the eardrum of the ear is vibrated. The hearing organ processes these vibrations into signals that are interpreted by the brain.
The main measure of acoustics in most regulations is reverberation. Reverberation is a sound phenomenon that arises from repeated reverberation of sound. An example is clapping your hands in a church or a hallway. Then one hears the reverberation. The sound source itself may or may not be audible. If a reverberation is observed after the sound source has already stopped, this is called echo.
The reverberation is therefore the decrease of the sound energy in a closed room after the interruption of the sound signal. The reverberation time is understood to mean the time interval within which the sound pressure falls to one thousandth of the initial value of the sound pressure in the event of a sudden interruption of the sound source in the room. This corresponds to a decrease of 60 dB (decibels).
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