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Small RoomsA review of the small-room show

Room 04 · The room

The room: listening rooms and their acoustics

What a small room does to a song: reverberation you can estimate with one equation, early reflections, and the noise floor a house controls.

A back room of a cafe before a show, bare brick wall, stacked chairs in the corner and a single microphone stand in the middle

Two things decide what a small room does to a song: how long a sound lasts in it after it stops being made, and how quiet the room is when nobody is making one. The first is reverberation, and a century old equation gives a usable estimate from a tape measure. The second is the noise floor, and it is owned by the house, not by the performer.

The notes here take those two in order. The first works the reverberation estimate through two rooms with the same floor and different ceilings, and says plainly where the estimate stops being trustworthy. The second is an inventory: everything in a small venue that makes a sound during the last song, and who can switch it off.

Estimates, not measurements

Nothing in this room is a measurement of a real venue. The numbers are worked examples with their inputs shown, so a reader can put in the dimensions of their own back room and get their own answer. Where a genuine measurement is required, the note names the standard that describes how to make one.

Room 04

In this room

The notes of this room, most recent first.

  1. Audience leaning forward on wooden benches with lights off, only the exit sign glowing at the back of the room

    · The room

    The house that lets the last song stay quiet

    An inventory of everything in a small venue that makes a sound during the last song, who can switch it off, and what it costs to ask.

  2. Low white ceiling above a small audience seen from the performer side, a heating pipe running across the top of the frame

    · The room

    What a low ceiling does to a ballad

    Two back rooms with the same floor and a different ceiling are two different instruments. Here is the arithmetic, worked through, with the point where it stops being trustworthy.

Two neighbouring rooms carry the same question further: The set and The writing. How the desk works is written in the editorial policy.