Beyond The Clap Test - Part 1: What Do We Need To Know, And Why

You’ve probably done the Clap Test before—gone into a room and clapped your hands in individual, staccato hits to quickly evaluate the sound of a room. I’ve done it myself many times. It gives us a quick idea of the reverb time in the room: useful, but incomplete... and it’s difficult to discern the overall sound of a room with any one test. As a result, one of the most common questions I get in my acoustics work is, “How do I tell if my room sounds good?” This innocent question is deeper than it seems, and the answers are not always obvious. One response is Duke Ellington’s classic maxim, “If it sounds good, it is good.” But this speaks more to the subjective, emotional experience of music in the room, and not so much about the acoustic qualities of the room itself. As sound recordists, mix engineers, and producers, we should familiarize ourselves with evaluating the sound of the rooms we work in, because the room always affects the sound of everything we do. This holds true for one-o