Small Reverberant Room
The Small Reverberant Room is designed to be very reverberant and used to test the absorption of materials used in rooms and in noise control.
This rooms walls are made of painted dense brick, it has a reinforced concrete sloping roof and a non-parallel pair of walls to make the room more diffuse. The reinforced concrete floor is built on a rockwool insulation board to provide vibration isolation.
- The small reverberant room is also used to examine the modal behaviour of small rooms.
- The room can also be easily changed, by adding absorbers and diffusers, to simulate a variety of acoustic environments.
Example application
This room was used as a simulated kitchen to record washing machine sounds as part of a Department of Trade and Industry project looking at methods to test the sound quality of products. Absorbent was added to the room to make it less reverberant and more like a kitchen.
Example application
Absorbing low frequency sound is difficult, because treatments have to be very large to work efficiently. Active control offers the possibility of bass absorption from relatively shallow surfaces, as well as the possibility of variable acoustics. This room has been used to pioneer techniques for active absorption, where loudspeakers are used to generate sounds to reduce the effects of room modes.
Vital statistics
Surface area of 81 m2
Volume of 48 m3