Development of Smartphone app for reverberation time measurements in rooms with furniture

Sammanfattning: Room acoustics, as a branch of architectural acoustics, has got more and more attention nowadays. One of the aims of the room acoustics is to develop different method to evaluate the acoustic performance of the rooms and to address human acoustic comfort needs. Meanwhile, the process of reverberation plays an important role in room acoustics, and it is also an evaluation standard of evaluating room acoustics effects. Reverberation time: The time it takes for a signal (sound) to drop by 60dB, which is an essential parameter about the “echo” in measured room. The reverberation time in a room depends on its absorption value and volume. If the volume of the room is large and the absorption value is small, RT60 is long. On the contrary, with a small volume and large absorption value of a room, RT60 will be short. More importantly, the sound will be unnatural or ambiguous if RT60 is too short or too long. Reverberation time is one of important parameters in room acoustics. It is employed as a standardized method to evaluate the acoustic comfort of an enclosure, which is one of the reasons why we research on this project. Nowadays Android phones are very popular around the world. In the statistics of operating systems of worldwide smart-phone in 2017, Android operating system’s market share is 85.9% in the word, which means Android device has the biggest number of users in the world. From what have been discussed above, the direction of our thesis is designed. The goal of our project is to build a convenient and fast Android app. This app can measure the reverberation time of indoor environment using Android phone, then allows user to store the measured data in this phone for further use.