Location:

Drinkward Recital Hall, Harvey Mudd College

Description of Space:

The recital hall can hold an audience of 100 people. The walls of the recital hall are padded well to make the hall an intentionally reverberant space. The ceiling is about 50 feet high. The floors and walls have a wooden finish.

Recording Setup:

The recording was made with the TASCAM DR-40 Sound Recorder placed on a tripod on the podium in the recital hall. The balloon was popped about 5 feet away from the recorder, in the center of the stage.

Reverberation time:

30 dB decay 0.5 second

50 dB decay: 1.1 second

Decay to Background Level: 1.5 second

Minimum: 1.6 second

Acoustic Description:

The walls of the hall were padded, which resulted in a relatively lower amount of resonance. However, the pop sound itself is very clear. The sound did not take too long to die down, and there wasn’t much echo.

Location

This recording was made at the Harvey Mudd Dining Hall, Hoch Shanahan Dining Commons during lunchtime. There are four big food stations at the Hoch, and this recording was taken at one of them. The food stations are one of the busiest parts of the dining hall. This is where the chefs and the students communicate. The students stand in long lines and socialize. This audio recording captures the soundscape of the peak lunchtime hour at Harvey Mudd: 12pm.

Recording

This recording was made using the TASCAM DR-40 Sound Recorder. The recorder was placed on a tripod and then on the counter of one of the chefs.

Description

There are no major events in this sound recording, therefore non are marked on the diagram. However, the three main elements of this soundscape are the plates/utensils, the students and the dining hall staff. Throughout the recording, the sounds of plates and utensils hitting each other are the most noticeable. Some of the sounds are more distant, indicating that these are sounds coming from the kitchen/behind the counter. Speech is heard from students in English and some speech is heard from the dining hall staff in both English and Spanish. The interesting aspect of this soundscape is that there is constant commotion and noise in the dining hall. Additionally, the two audible sentences presumably from students both use the common phrase: “It’s lit”. A student says “lit, fam” at the 0:08 mark, and another student says “lit” at the 1:51 mark. While this might just be a coincidence, it is interesting to hear a commonly uttered phrase twice in the dining hall soundscape in a two minute recording.