Does a larger room have a longer or shorter reverberation time than a smaller room?
A larger room has a _______ reverberation time than a smaller room.
Longer
or
Shorter
Answer: Longer
Large rooms, rooms with fewer surfaces, and rooms with harder, smoother, less-fuzzy surfaces are more reverberant (sound lingers longer after it is suddenly stopped). The more reverberant the room, the longer the reverberation time, measured in seconds. Rooms with unamplified speech, amplified speech, and amplified music generally want to be less reverberant: they want to be smaller, with fuzzier surfaces. In contrast, rooms for unamplified music, like concert halls, generally want to be more reverberant: larger, with harder and smoother surfaces.
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Every time sound hits a surface, some of the sound energy is lost to that surface….For a room of a fixed size, the “mean free path” for sound traveling between surfaces will be shorter when there are more surfaces (like more furniture). So sound will decay faster because there are more surfaces to absorb it.
That’s why your apartment sounds so reverberant when you move all the furniture out.
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