Acoustic Space: Millikan Female Bathroom

Media

Spectrogram (see below)

Waveform (uploaded)

Intensity (uploaded)

Description of the space:

This balloon pop took place in the female bathroom on the first floor of Millikan in Pomona College. The bathroom is not a private stall but a communal one situated right by the staircase and diagonal to the physics lounge. Walking into the space, there is a rectangular area right by the door where the sinks are situated. Then there is a narrow space that extends down where all the stalls are located. The walls of the bathroom are tiled. The balloon pop was done in the middle of the rectangular area.

Recording setup and recording device:

The way it was set up is that after the balloon was all blown up, it was placed right in the middle of the rectangular area. Then, the TASCAM DR-40 sound recorder was placed about three feet away from the balloon on the ground with the tripod attached to it.

Reverberation time:

30 dB decay: 0.368 s

50 dB decay: 0.752 s

60 dB decay: 1.056 s

decay to background level: 3.2 s

seconds until reach minimum: 5.504 s

max intensity dB: 92.069

min intensity dB: 15.0210

Acoustic Description:

Without the balloon and simply speaking in this bathroom, there is an echoic sound in the space. The voice seems clear and crisp and very focused. The sound is not hollow like that in a church space but there is a slight fine echo. The bathroom door was closed was the balloon pop took place. Although the bathroom size is relatively large, the balloon pop sound was still very focused, clean and crisp with a rather loud pop because of the structure. The balloon pop was done in the rectangular area, and this area could “trap” the sound because the other part of the bathroom was a long narrow hallway with stalls sort of like a tunnel. That did not create much opening for the sound and therefore the pop was quite focused in the rectangular area. The sound bounced off the three surrounding walls and did since the other opening was just the tunnel of stalls, there was not much space for the sound to escape. It is interesting because the spectrogram shows that there is a very dominant loud sound in the beginning right at the pop and then the sound rapidly descends. There is a short time a few seconds after the pop that there is a dark grey streak in the spectrogram, but otherwise the pattern seems to be a very high peak at the pop and then a rapid descend.