Room Optimiser

About
Bread and butter for many acousticians is to determine the type and amount of acoustic treatment to enhance the acoustic quality in an existing room. For many not-so-critical spaces this comes down to adding acoustic absorption to the room in order to reduce its reverberation time (e.g. to improve speech intelligibility). A good design leads to a balanced sounding room, denoted by an evenly spread decay of the sound energy over the full frequency spectrum. To achieve this, it’s necessary to look for the right combination of different absorbers which leads to these well-balanced room acoustic characteristics. This is an iterative process and doing it manually mostly has exhausted you before reaching an optimal solution, simply because there’s so many different acoustic absorbers available, each with their own characteristic absorption spectrum and moreover possible variants in configuration (e.g. thickness, type of porous absorbent, etc.).

Within the context of a project, Sonores Acoustics developed this little application (the ‘Room Optimiser’) that comes up with an optimal solution based on the existing room’s geometry, existing reverberation time and target RT curve. The solution can be restricted to fulfill a set of preconditions, such as minimal or maximal surface area and maximal thickness of the absorber. An alternative solution can be generated with the click of a button. Future developments could e.g. take into account the distance from manufacturer to building site or materials used so that the optimal solution takes a sustainability factor into account. Other future additions could include multiple RT models (currently Sabine) and a selection of preset target RT curves for different room types.