I remember one room where we ended-up custom fabricating 150 Helmholtz resonators to tame the beast. If I remember correctly it had a 2,000 W sound system with an array of various speakers. The walls has six layers of drywall glued and screwed together. The concrete floor was isolated from walls and floated on hard rubber.
We ran impulse tests with specialized software as we went along to fine tune the resonators and other treatments. The speaker system manufacturer sent their acoustics expert to help. As an EE you sometimes get to work on projects far outside your area of expertise. I have always embraced those opportunities and usually come of of them having learned a ton of new and interesting stuff.
Interestingly enough I was showing these Excel tools to my oldest son the other day. He is getting into Excel and this workbook has examples of doing things with VBA one does not normally see on normal Excel spreadsheets. At that time I thought it could be interesting to re-code this with Python and build a neat little website around it. The comment on this thread by acqq made me come back to that thought. Could be interesting.
The section on reverberation reminds me of Dr.Cooper at the cinema, conducting impulse response tests.
http://realtraps.com/modecalc.htm
Anybody has better links to the programs and material which would let an amateur (but still with a technical background) evaluate and experiment with the acoustic conditions of the room?
As an enthusiast, would you pay some modest amount for access to more related calculators and analysis tools?
I hope CGA gets attention because there is a lot of work to be done before a fully synthetic world simulation could be realized.
Consider the challenges with modelling acoustics. The audible spectrum spans from 2E1 to 2E4 Hz and those difference in wavelenghts make for different behaviors in rooms, not to mention the challenges of accurately modeling diffraction and diffusion. Computer modelling largely is still brute force, where rays are randomly drawn from a source in hopes of eventually finding a receiver's location in the room before reaching inaudibility. Recently some algorithms that were developed for computer graphics have been introduced in acoustics to make room reflections not brute force anymore. I've created an early implementation of this based on the work of another HNer, kabla. Realtime raytracer http://threedb.com/2d-viewer.php
Have you asked him? Prof Russell is quite approachable: https://twitter.com/drussellpsu
