Contribution
Rethinking the Measurement of Sound Absorption: Challenges, Advances and Emerging Methods
* Presenting author
Abstract:
Sound absorption is essential across many acoustical disciplines, from room and building acoustics to noise control, virtual acoustics, and the development of advanced audio technologies. Despite substantial attention and effort from the acoustics community, sound absorption remains a complex and elusive phenomenon to characterize accurately. This keynote explores the historical context and fundamental challenges encountered in classical, standardized measurement methods. It also discusses recent advancements in sound field analysis and array-based characterization, which have significantly deepened our understanding of the physical processes associated with sound absorption in reverberant sound fields. These developments offer new insights into how materials interact with their acoustic environments, shedding light on why standardized methods do not provide reproducible results across laboratories. Finally, this talk will examine how recent research findings are moving the field closer to reliable methodologies that could potentially resolve a long-standing debate in the history of modern acoustics: “The absorption coefficient problem”.