CMU School of Drama


Tuesday, January 15, 2019

Tech Topic: Coherence & Reverberation

ProSoundWeb: Coherence is a common feature found on many analyzers that enables us to distinguish signal from noise. It will indicate whether you’re measuring a loudspeaker or, for example, a moving light.

Coherence is subject to change. One of the aspects involved, among others, that we’ll explore in-depth is the relationship between the direct sound of a loudspeaker in a room and the room’s reverberation.

1 comment:

Margaret Shumate said...

A lot of this article was very technical and difficult to understand, but the first part about coherence and comb filters was very informative and instructive. The explanation of the relationship between noise, comb filtering, and coherence, especially, was quite helpful and objective, methodically detailing the interplay of those three things in a way that I had not seen so directly laid out. The explanations of both ripple and the existence of a ‘critical distance’ for D/R ratios was similarly helpful; I was not familiar with ripple and didn’t know enough about the properties of reverberant sound to even conceive of the concept of a critical distance. The more mathematical calculation of the critical distance, however, was confusing. Upon reading it several times, it began to make conceptual sense, but it is still not clear to me how the formula might be applied in a useful way, either when designing sound systems or when getting used to a new space.