What does the word acoustics mean

The word acoustics means the whole science of sound—what causes it, how it travels, and its effects. A simple illustration will show the workings of these principles. Any toy noisemaker will do for the experiment. Sound it in the bathroom with the door closed, and the noise will be very great; the bathroom floor and walls are hard and sound-reflecting, and even the bath­room fixtures help to reflect the sound. Open the bathroom door and do it again, and it will not sound so loud.

Then take it into a large room, and the sound will be still softer. how the acoustics expert works Giving a theater, hall or other room good acoustics is a difficult scientific problem. First, the acoustics expert will want to know exactly what kind of sound is to be used in the room. If he wants the hall to be suitable for piano concerts, he will find out exactly how long it takes the sound of a piano's notes to reach the farthest corner of the hall, and how long it takes that sound to bounce back.

 He will then choose wall coverings, and sometimes coverings for the ceiling and floor as well, that will bounce back the sound at the right rate of speed to make the piano seem at its very best in all parts of the hall at the same time. If the hall is to be used for a large orchestra, he does the same thing with the sound of the or­chestra at full strength. If it is to be used for speakers, or actors, he tests it for keeping the sound clear at the back of the hall even though the speaker uses only a normal tone of voice. It is possible to arrange the acoustics of a iarge auditorium so that a whisper at one end of the room can be heard clearly at the other end—even several hundred feet away. If the hall is just being built, the problem is one on which the archi­tect and acoustics engineers will work together, and the shape of the walls and height of the ceiling may be planned so as to give the room good acoustics. There is more information on this subject in the article on sound.