Application of Hamiltonian of ray motion to room acoustics

Abstract

Based on a standard Hamiltonian of acoustic ray, it is shown that a ray motion in a finite region can be treated as a particle motion inside a potential well. The boundary reflections of ray can be described by introducing a so-called confining potential to confine a ray motion in a closed domain. It is shown that the square well potential model for the ray motion can reproduce the reverberation time in a two-dimensional room with irregular walls which is consistent with the Norris-Eyring law. It is also shown that the sound reverberation relates the ray chaos of the billiards in polygons with smooth convex walls.