By day, he was a mild-mannered professor of physics.
By night, he was the midnight phantom of a Harvard lecture hall.
But today, because of his unusual experiments with ordinary seat cushions, he's known as the father of architectural acoustics!
Wallace Clement Sabine was the physicist credited with building the core of the science of architectural acoustics. Sabine attended Harvard University for graduate studies in physics and was appointed assistant professor of physics in 1890. Although he neglected to take a Ph.D., Sabine devoted himself to teaching, and his courses were among the most popular in the department. In 1895, when he embraced the challenge to turn an acoustically impossible lecture hall at Harvard into a usable room, Sabine embarked on the pioneering journey into architectural acoustics.
For several years Sabine and his assistants experimented with and observed sound characteristics of the room. Some nights they would borrow hundreds of seat cushions from the Sanders Theater which was known for it's acoustic excellence, and using organ pipes, they would measure the time it took for different frequencies of sound to decay to inaudibility with different materials. Every morning following these experiments Sabine and his assistants would return both the lecture hall and the Sanders Theater to their original states for use that day.
Based on information gained in his experiments Sabine developed an equation that made it possible to calculate and consistently predict reverberation time in a room. In 1900, armed with his recent findings, Sabine undertook the job of acoustical consultant for the New Boston Music Hall. After analyzing the already completed designs for the hall, Sabine determined that it would have been an acoustical nightmare. Utilizing Sabine's knowledge and experience, a new design was developed and the hall was completed. The New Boston Music Hall, now known as Symphony Hall is still said to be one of the best concert halls in the world.
Sabine also had an uncanny talent for putting seemingly abstract concepts and theories into practical uses, as well as explaining them in terms of human experience rather than just formulas and numbers. In his first presentation to the American Institute he gave a description of sound reverberation that serves as an excellent example. "In the lecture room of Harvard University... the rate of absorption was so small that a word spoken in an ordinary tone of voice was audible for five and a half seconds afterwards. During this time even a very deliberate speaker would have uttered 12 or 15 succeeding syllables. Thus, the successive enunciations blended into a loud sound, through which and above which it was necessary to hear and distinguish the orderly progression of the speech." It was problems like these that Sabine sought to eliminate using his acquired knowledge of the physical behavior of sound.
Sabine made many more discoveries before his death in 1919. He experimented with the relationship between sound absorption in a room and sound transmission through solid materials. He developed a previously unachieved understanding of the difference between structure-borne sound transmission and air-borne sound transmission. In the course of all of his discoveries and explanations, Sabine laid the foundation for what we now call architectural acoustics, and in his honor, the international standard unit of measurement for sound absorption is the sabin.
