Wallace Clement (Ware) Sabine - Career

Physicist, the founder of architectural acoustics, born in Richwood, Ohio, USA. He studied at Ohio State University, then taught at Harvard, where he worked for the rest of his life. A specialist in the acoustic problems of buildings, by 1898 he had devised the Sabine law, that the reverberation time multiplied by the total absorptivity of the room is proportional to the volume of the room. He advised on the projected new Boston Symphony Hall (1898–1900), and became much in demand to advise on architectural acoustics.

Sabine was acoustical architect of Boston's Symphony Hall, widely considered one of the two or three best concert halls in the world for its acoustics.

Career

Sabine's career is the story of the birth of the field of modern architectural acoustics. In 1895, acoustically improving the Fogg Lecture Hall, part of the recently constructed Fogg Art Museum, was considered an impossible task by the senior staff of the physics department at Harvard.

Sabine tackled the problem by trying to determine what made the Fogg Lecture Hall different from other, acoustically acceptable facilities. For the next several years, Sabine and a group of assistants spent each night moving materials between the two lecture halls and testing the acoustics. 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, 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.

Sabine was able to determine, through these late night forays, that a definitive relationship exists between the quality of the acoustics, the size of the chamber, and the amount of absorption surfaces present.

By studying various rooms judged acoustically good for their intended uses, Sabine determined that good concert halls had reverberation times of 2-2.25 seconds (with shorter reverberation times, a music hall seems too "dry" to the listener), while good lecture halls had reverberation times of slightly under 1 second. As regards the Fogg Museum lecture room, Sabine noted that a spoken word remained audible for about 5.5 seconds, or about an additional 12-15 words if the speaker continued talking.

Using what he discovered, Sabine deployed sound absorbing materials throughout the Fogg Lecture Hall to cut its reverberation time down and reduce the "echo effect." This accomplishment cemented Wallace Sabine's career, and led to his hiring as the acoustical consultant for Boston's Symphony Hall, the first concert hall to be designed using quantitative acoustics. His acoustic design was a great success and Symphony Hall is generally considered one of the best symphony halls in the world.