Wallace Clement Sabine was an American physicist and engineer regarded as the founder of architectural acoustics. Commissioned in 1895 to solve the notoriously poor sound quality of the lecture hall at Harvard's Fogg Art Museum, he spent years measuring how reverberation time varied with a room's absorptive materials, deriving the Sabine reverberation equation relating a room's reverberation time to its volume and total sound absorption. He applied his formula to design the acoustics of Boston's Symphony Hall, opened in 1900, the first concert hall engineered on scientific acoustic principles, and the unit of sound absorption, the sabin, is named in his honor. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
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How did a lecture hall at Harvard lead Wallace Clement Sabine to Boston's Symphony Hall?
The Fogg lecture hall fix made him the acoustical consultant for Symphony Hall.
In 1895 the Harvard president asked Sabine to improve the poor acoustics of a lecture hall in the newly opened Fogg Art Museum. Through experiments he found the relationship between the quality of acoustics, the size of the room and the amount of absorbing surface, and he formally defined reverberation time. He hung sound-absorbing materials in the Fogg Lecture Hall to cut its reverberation time. That success established his career and led to his becoming the acoustical consultant for Boston's Symphony Hall, the first concert hall designed using quantitative acoustics.
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Source Wallace Clement Sabine (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributorsLead sentence 1tier 2Quote, Lead sentence 1
Wallace Clement Sabine (June 13, 1868 – January 10, 1919) was an American physicist who founded the field of architectural acoustics.
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Wikipedia contributors, Wikimedia FoundationLead section
Wallace Clement Sabine (June 13, 1868, January 10, 1919) was an American physicist who founded the field of architectural acoustics.
- In Field: Acoustical Engineering
In Group: Acoustics Pioneers, Lead paragraph
who founded the field of architectural acoustics
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