Reverberation Essay

Steven W. Smith describes the human ear as an exceedingly complex organ. There are multiple levels of the ear. The outer ear is the flap of skin, the cartilage on the side of the head, and the ear canal. The outer ear leads environmental sounds into the middle and inner ear, which are the organs inside the skull. These sound waves cause the eardrum to vibrate. The vibrations are caught by the middle ear, a set of small bones, which transfer the vibrations to the cochlea (inner ear). Here, the sound waves are converted to neural impulses. The neural network in the human brain decodes information from both ears.

Within the cochlea resides a basilar membrane, a supporting structure for the cochlea nerve. The basilar membrane works as a frequency spectrum analyser. The basilar membrane is stretched from the oval window, i.e. the middle ear, and ends at the apex of the cochlea. At the oval window the basilar membrane is stiff and it is here the high frequencies are caught and start to resonate, while the lower frequencies are caught at the apex, where the basilar membrane is more flexible. This structural organization is called the Place Principle and it is a theory on how

It bounces off the walls and other parts of rooms and concert halls and gets mixed up with its echoes…” (Steiglitz, s. 290). As shown in figure 3.1, reverberation starts as a direct sound which is then reflected off of surfaces multiple times, the direct sound is first reflected into early reflections/ distinct reflections, and then those sounds reflect creating a lot of reflections which cancel each other out, and decay over time, this collections of reflections is what is referred to as reverberation. Reverberation differs from echoes in that the surfaces, which reflect the sounds, are 17 metres or less from the sound source, when reverberation