Interactive Reverberation Tool

	Calculate Reverberation Time  and Hear the Difference! Five Simple Steps:
	1.	Describe the space
	2.	See recommended guidelines
	3.	Select surface materials
	4.	The program will calculate the current reverberation time
	5.	Select treatment materials for your space to meet the reverberation recommendation and hear the difference, before and after!
	Calculate Reverberation

Overview of Reverberation

What is reverberation?
A reverberation is the overall effect of reflected sound and the time required for reflected sound to become inaudible.  Short reverberation times are good for speech intelligibility in learning spaces.

Why is it important?
Teachers and students will do their best in an environment that is conducive to learning.  A poor acoustical environment will often increase stress and decrease concentration, especially with younger children, students for whom English is a second language, students with learning disabilities and the hearing impaired.  It can also contribute to teacher “burnout” caused by the stress of talking “over” the noise.

Classroom acoustics

Classroom acoustics and ANSI S12.60 [ ANSI S12.60: now available online at no cost ]

ANSI Standard S12.60 for Classroom Acoustics addresses the issues of both reverberation time and background noise and their effect on speech intelligibility by placing maximum permissible levels on each.
Under the new standard, the maximum reverberation time in an unoccupied, furnished classroom with a volume under 10,000 cubic feet is 0.6 seconds, and 0.7 seconds for a classroom between 10,000 and 20,000 cubic feet. The maximum level of background noise allowed in the same classroom is 35 decibels (dBA).
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