Room Acoustics (lecture notes)

Abstract

Room acoustics is commonly regarded and studied as an applied subdiscipline of engineering acoustics. It is likely for this reason that many textbooks and lecture notes on the topic provide a too brief, unsystematic, and incomplete physical basics of the theory, while focusing on the practical aspects of calculation, measurement, assessment, and optimization of sound fields in rooms, such as lecture halls, control rooms, concert halls, and opera houses. While such approach may be satisfactory for a broad community of acoustic engineers, it leaves many important physical concepts and mechanisms obscure and their understanding superficial and unsolid, especially among inexperienced practitioners and students. The main purpose of this text is to provide a brief yet self-contained introduction to the physics of room acoustics or, more generally, acoustics of closed spaces, starting with the governing equations of fluid dynamics. While covering all essential topics and concepts in the field, such as modal analysis, geometrical and statistical theory, room impulse response, subjective criteria and descriptors of sound fields in rooms, acoustic design and simulations, and acoustic elements (reflectors, absorbers, and diffusers), it does so in a systematic and, arguably, didactically more appropriate way. The rigorous derivations of many important theoretical results rely on well-established methods of modern mathematical physics, but require only basic mathematical skills of the reader, since all mathematical tools are introduced and explained in sufficient detail. On the other hand, the thorough derivations expose the underlying assumptions and limitations of the obtained results, the proper understanding of which is crucial for the correct use of the results in practice.