Wallace Clement Sabine

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.