The room acoustics of gymnasium building

This paper discusses the room acoustics of gymnasium building. which is to accommodate more than 5000 spectators for various indoor sports such as volley ball, basketball, tennis and badminton. When a sound is generated in a space, the listener will first hear the sound via the direct path, from the source. Shortly afterward the listener will hear its reflections off the walls which will be attenuated. Each reflection will in turn be further delayed and attenuated as it is reflected again and again. This results in the total reverberation of the sound. A gymnasium space can be a highly reverberant due to the large space volume, coupled with an abundance of hard surfaces. Some designers frequently overlook the need for reverberation control in gymnasium and other large spaces. The high level of reverberation promotes a high poise level that interferes with speech intelligibility, thus degrading the primary functions of the spaces. Moreover, the additional functions, such as student assemblies, community meetings, or music performances, which are very common in the large spaces, will severely suffer from the excessive reverberation. This case study deals with mid-frequency reverberation times of about 7s. Renovation treatments to control the reverberation are developed, using computer models.