What the book is about
In 1895 the young Harvard physicist Wallace Sabine was asked to fix a lecture hall nobody could understand. Using organ pipes, a stopwatch and seat cushions borrowed from a nearby theatre, he discovered that reverberation time is proportional to the volume of a room and inversely proportional to the total absorption of its surfaces.
That relationship – the Sabine formula, RT60 ≈ 0.161·V/A in metric units – founded architectural acoustics. Sabine went on to advise on Boston Symphony Hall (1900), still ranked among the finest concert halls in the world. This volume, published after his death, collects his papers.
Key ideas
- Reverberation time (RT60)
- Absorption coefficients
- The Sabine formula
- Concert hall design