Investigating architectural acoustics modeling with the summer undergraduate research or internship experience in acoustics program

Dante Christian was chosen to participate in an inspiring 10-week experience with the Acoustical Society of America’s Summer Undergraduate Research Experience in Acoustics (SURIEA) Program. Given his physics major and architectural background, SURIEA coordinators felt that he would thrive best as an intern at Acentech (an architectural acoustics firm). The research project that Dante landed on was an auralization of the Warner Theater’s rehearsal room—a structure in Erie, PA. Two of his mentors from Acentech visited to make reverberation time measurements and to ensure that the rehearsal room was behaving as it was intended to. Thus, these measurements came to serve as the backbone of his project’s structure. For Dante’s summer research, he went through the processes of modeling in SketchUp and in Trebel (a geometric and wave-based solver) to gather and simulate impulse responses for the Warner Theater’s Rehearsal room. He worked iteratively to assign absorption and scattering coefficients to the model that best fit the measured experimental results. This is because, especially, absorption coefficients of every material in the room were not specified. Overall, this research project taught Dante how to critically think about a space, its materials, and how its materials interact with the soundscape.