Sabine tackled the problem by trying to determine what made the Fogg Lecture Hall different from other, acoustically acceptable facilities. In particular, the Sanders Theater was considered acoustically excellent. For the next several years, Sabine and his assistants spent each night moving materials between the two lecture halls and testing the acoustics. On some nights they would borrow hundreds of seat cushions from the Sanders Theater. Using an organ pipe and a stopwatch, Sabine performed thousands of careful measurements (though inaccurate by present standards) of the time required for different frequencies of sounds to decay to inaudibility in the presence of the different materials. He tested reverberation time with several different types of Oriental rugs inside Fogg Lecture Hall, and with various numbers of people occupying its seats, and found that the body of an average person decreased reverberation time by about as much as six seat cushions. Once the measurements were taken and before morning arrived, everything was quickly replaced in both lecture halls, in order to be ready for classes the next day.
>Much of the sound we hear in a typical movie is either created or substantially altered in post-production. If the sound were simply recorded along with the picture and left at that, the microphone would pick up too much background noise and not enough dialogue. An engineer therefore adjusts the intensity of the audio at different frequencies, adds or filters out ambient sound, and introduces a subtle amount of reverb, so the sound matches the spatial environment shown onscreen.
That's not the half of it. For many scenes and pretty much every scene outdoors, they use ADR, which means the actors went into a studio and recorded their lines dubbing over their lip movements on film. Not to mention foley artists recreate every footstep, door open/close, etc - very little of that is natural in a hollywood film.
As a sound guy, I've always been into acoustic architecture. It's overlooked (except for performance spaces or recording studios) and under appreciated, when done well it really makes a difference, it can really set the atmosphere of a place. As part of the backlash against open office it's gotten a lot more attention (as the article mentions).
But this being Hacker News, I want to complain about the most annoying trends in acoustic architectural design: Restaurants.
I've noticed over the last ~10 years up-scale restaurants designing their spaces to be extremely "live", IE not much sound dampening so the place echoes amongst the concrete walls. The idea is that it sounds like so many people are there and it's really happening, because with even with two tables it can sound full. But so hard to have a conversation!
I skimmed the article briefly and didn’t see this mentioned, but it was pivotal in the advancement of architectural acoustic design: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallace_Clement_Sabine
Sabine tackled the problem by trying to determine what made the Fogg Lecture Hall different from other, acoustically acceptable facilities. In particular, the Sanders Theater was considered acoustically excellent. For the next several years, Sabine and his assistants spent each night moving materials between the two lecture halls and testing the acoustics. On some nights they would borrow hundreds of seat cushions from the Sanders Theater. Using an organ pipe and a stopwatch, Sabine performed thousands of careful measurements (though inaccurate by present standards) of the time required for different frequencies of sounds to decay to inaudibility in the presence of the different materials. He tested reverberation time with several different types of Oriental rugs inside Fogg Lecture Hall, and with various numbers of people occupying its seats, and found that the body of an average person decreased reverberation time by about as much as six seat cushions. Once the measurements were taken and before morning arrived, everything was quickly replaced in both lecture halls, in order to be ready for classes the next day.