Sound power emitted by a pure-tone source in a reverberation room

Energy considerations are of enormous practical importance in acoustics. In "energy acoustics," sources of noise are described in terms of the sound power they emit, the underlying assumption being that this property is independent of the particular environment where the sources are placed. However, it is well known that the sound power output of a source emitting a pure tone or a narrow band of noise actually varies significantly with its position in a reverberation room at low frequencies, and even larger variations occur between different rooms. The resulting substantial uncertainty in measurements of sound power as well as in predictions based on knowledge of sound power is one of the fundamental limitations of energy acoustics. The existing theory for this phenomenon is fairly complicated and has only been validated rather indirectly. This paper describes a far simpler theory and demonstrates that it gives predictions in excellent agreement with the established theory. The results are confirmed by experimental results as well as finite element calculations.