ABSTRACT
The isolation of meaningful physical sound field parameters and the examination of their relevance have in the past been and still are the subject of numerous investigations —experimental investigations —since answers to these problems, which are not affected by the stigma of pure speculation, can only be obtained by systematic listening tests. This chapter introduces the first parameters which is the stationary sound pressure level or energy density that a sound source of given output power produces in a room. Secondly, if the sound decay in the room under consideration would strictly obey an exponential law all the parameters defined above could be directly expressed by the reverberation time. A more general notion which is rather to characterize the subjective aspect of reverberation is ‘subjective reverberation time’ or ‘reverberance’. However, there is no sharp distinction between both these concepts.
