After years of this research, Sabine poured over his notes and discovered a mathematical relationship between the size and materials of a room and its reverberation time. He started all over again from scratch, this time wearing the exact same outfit every time. A precise experimenter, Sabine once threw out over three thousand measurements after determining his own clothes had a small effect upon the sound of the room. He took measurements of different reverberation times in different rooms on campus and brought in various sound-absorbing materials to the echoing lecture hall to see what difference they would make to the hall’s reverb-time.

Sabine worked in the dead of night to ensure as much silence as possible.

And through his efforts on this small-sounding task, Sabine would eventually become known as the father of architectural acoustics. So the university turned to a young lecturer in the physics department named Wallace Sabine and asked if he could fix the space. In 1895, Harvard University completed the construction of the Fogg Art Museum and found that one of its primary lecture halls had so much reverb, it would be impossible to use for classes. Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1895 Architectural acoustics were pretty much a roll of the dice in any given project. Up until the early 1900s, designers and engineers knew very little about the effects of architecture on sound. This degree of acoustic control, however, is a relatively recent phenomenon. We can make churches sound like clubs and clubs sound like opera houses. With sound-proofing and selective-amplification, we can add reverb or take it away. Today, through a combination of passive and active acoustics, architects and acousticians can control the sounds of spaces to fit any kind of need. Architect Eero Saarinen, 1954, image by Daderot (CC BY-SA 3.0) Kresge Auditorium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Active acoustics are sound systems that use technology like speakers and microphones to boost or minimize certain sounds in a space…and the sonic control they offer can be dynamic and variable and quite dramatic. Materials like carpeting and drapery soak up sound, while materials like glass and porcelain make a room more echoey. Passive acoustics are the materials in a space, like the padding in our studio or wooden floors or plaster walls. There are two primary ways to control the sound of a space: active acoustics and passive acoustics.

Art acoustic reverb presets