Contribution
Evaluating a Mobile App for Reverberation Time Measurements: Are valid values at your fingertips?
* Presenting author
Abstract:
Reverberation time (RT) remains the main target value and assessment metric for room acoustic treatment. Most requirements are set for the reverberation time or derived metrics. Thus, RT measurements are often the starting point for needed room acoustic optimizations and are also used to examine target values as projects move along or have been finished, making conducting RT measurements a core task for acousticians. Modern mobile devices offer sufficient computation power and the opportunity for pleasant and intuitive user interfaces, thanks to large touch screens. They have become omnipresent and are always at hand. Consequently, many mobile apps offering RT measurements have been brought to the market, mostly with poor accuracy and limited features. In this paper, we provide the results of a validation process for a new mobile app that allows RT measurements with switched-off noise, impulse signals, or exponential sweeps. Accurate results can be obtained by employing high-quality, yet affordable external hardware for the sound source and microphone. This has been evaluated by benchmarking octave band results from 125 Hz to 8 kHz to a commercially available measurement kit in various rooms, ranging from an office to a church with average RTs from 0.5 s to 1.3 s.