Location:

Music practice room found in Harvey Mudd College’s Platt Campus Center.

 

Description of Space:

The practice room is a small room, about 7 ft by 10 ft, that has sound-reducing padded walls. The space contained a few chairs, as well as a book shelf and a piano on one side of the room. The floor is carpeted, and the walls have a kind of carpet on them as well.

 

Recording Setup:

The recording was done with the TASCAM DR-40 Sound Recorder placed on a short tripod on top of the piano, facing the middle of the room. I stood 6 feet from the recorder holding the recorded 18-inch balloon roughly 5 feet above the ground.

 

Reverberation time:

30 dB decay 0.32 seconds

50 dB decay: 0.72 seconds

Decay to Background Level: 2.98 seconds

Minimum: 3.64 seconds

 

Acoustic Description:

The padded walls of the practice room cut down on resonance, as the walls tend not to vibrate with the sounds, but they seem to add some reverberation, as can be seen by the second peak after the balloon pop at roughly 0.02 seconds. This is very soon after the pop, but it shows an echo of some sort all the same. The sound took a relatively long time to decay as it remained in the room throughout the recording.