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87th Meeting: AcousticalSociety of America

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ing directly from the source and include the case when the walls are either diffuse or specular reflectors. The insertion of a directionally independent spectral density in the variational indicator for the specular reflecting wall case leads to that derived for the diffusely reflecting wall case. Numerical techniques are described and specific cases are reported which give the reverberant field at each of the six walls as a function of source position and wall absorption. For small absorption, the deviation from that corresponding to uniform energy density is independent of absorption, suggesting that the

state of ideal diffuseness (as regards spatial uniformity) cannot be achieved, even in the limit of perfectly reflecting walls.
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to its Music and Music Library Buildings. The addition contains some 30 teaching studios, 20 practice rooms, an electronic music studio, a large rehersal room, a small ensemble room, and a huge area of library storage space. Upon completion and occupancy of the building, all of its facilities were found to be in excellent acoustical condition, with one exception: the sound isolation characteristics of the practice rooms, which were, by any standards, a dismal failure. What went wrong? This question is answered by tracing the history of the project from its conceptual stages through its actual completion and occupancy, including objective comparisons between the design criteria and the as-built measurements. Some thoughts and comments concerning possible remedial measures are presented.

FS. Acoustical designof the BostonUniversity Concert Hall. John B. Crabtree (Westwood, Massachusetts 02090)
In 1957, Boston University acquired a large, five-story automobile dealership building and hastily converted it into the School of Fine and Applied Arts; the repair shop became a 450seat concert hall, and its acoustical design was found to be unsatisfactory for all of its many uses. In 1971, the interior of the building was gutted by fire, and a crash program was initiated to rebuild it for occupancy by the opening of the Fall semester of 1972. Owing to severe budgetary limitations, only minor alterations could be made ir the existing architectural
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F7. Transmission loss measurement by small reverberation chambers. Chung Y. Tsui, * Carl Voorhees, and Jackson C. S.

Yang (Mechanical Engineering Department, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742)
Even though the measurement of transmission loss by the two-room method is well established and documented, the application has traditionally been applied to architectural structures such as wall panels and doors. This requires the construction of rooms of large volume with thick walls, which was severally reported in acoustic journals. Nevertheless, there exist panels whose sizes are small with respect to the wall thickness due to their inherent applications or other considerations such as costs or difficulties in fabrication. These panels are not apt to be tested in large rooms with thick walls because of the resulting deterioration in diffusivity due to the existence of a tunnel between the chambers. In such cases, smaller rooms with correspondingly thinner walls may be used to advantage in the determination of the transmission loss. This paper describes the construction of a pair of twin reverberation chambers in the shape of a pentagonal parallelepiped with

parameters (cubicvolume, basic geometry, etc.), while the

demands for adequate sound isolation had greatly increased since 1957 because of the high levels of traffic noise caused by the Massachusetts Turnpike Extension that abuts the concert hall's north wall. The unusual variety of uses of the hall, not

only for performance but also for rehearsal (including the accommodationof an 150-piece symphonyorchestra), caused by the concert hall's being the only performing space currently on campus, created some striking room acoustics problems;
these are discussed, and the solutions finally incorporated are described in full. The steps taken to eliminate the high levels of traffic noise are shown, including before and after measurements. Subjective reactions to the new acoustical design of the concert hall have been highly favorable.
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an inclined roof. Acoustic characteristics such as diffusivity,

cutoff frequency, and reverberation time of the rooms are presented. Results of transmission loss measurements in aluminum and carbon--epoxy composite specimens are also

F6. Practice rooms of the Harvard University Music Building: a case history. John B. Crabtree (Westwood, Massachusetts
02090)

reported. [Supported by NASA Grant NGR 21-002-350. ]

In 1969, Harvard University began planning a large addition

*Present address: Institute of Sound and Vibration The University, Southampton, England.

Research,

TUESDAY, 23 APRIL 1974

Session G. Noise II' Noise Measurement

GOLD ROOM, 2:00 P.M.

Ralph Huntley, Chairman

314 River Road, Chatham,New Jersey07928

Invited Paper
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Ol. Qualificationproceduresfor free-field conditionsfor sound power determinationof sound sources. G. Hubner (SiemensAG, Dynamowerk, Laboratorium flit Maschinenger[iusche, Berlin, West Germany)
For determination of sound power of sources by the "method of enveloping measurement

surfaces," the test environment should provide a measurement surfacewhich lies (1) outside
J. Acoust. Soc. Am., Vol. 55, Supplement

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