In the Home Studio - Part 3 episode we simulated the steady state pressure field for a realistically shaped room governed by the linear wave equation. The boundary condition for the room was that of ideally rigid walls. We seen that the effect of such a boundary condition is an extremely uneven frequency response. This due to how sharp the resonances of the room are. In this episode we will introduce slightly more realistic boundary conditions and see what the effect on the solution is.

In the Home Studio - Part 1 episode we gave a first look at the response of a realistically shaped room with rigid walls. We understood how to develop and run a model with an uniform velocity sphere source placed somewhere in the room. We run the model up to $400$ $\text{Hz}$ with the help of the convergence considerations outlined in the Dealing with Convergence Issues episode. In the Home Studio - Part 2 episode instead we used Elmer’s WaveSolver to compute the eigenmodes of the room.

In the Home Studio - Part 1 episode we computed the steady state field of a realistic, but still rigid walled, room. We put a source in the room, modelled as a flux boundary condition, and run the study at few different frequencies. The solutions that we found were reminiscent of modal patterns, which is expected as the low frequency response of a room is dominated by its resonances. However, that kind of study does not inform us on the actual resonance frequencies of the room, which are properties of great interest, as well as how the associated modal shapes (eigenmodes, or eigenfunctions) look like.

In the Rigid Walled Room episode we seen how to model a rectangular room with rigid walls. We driven the room at the modal frequencies and compared the solution field with the theoretical modal shapes, finding that the results matched single modal shapes real well until, at a frequency high enough, the contribution of multiple modes (in addition to that related to the driving modal frequency) became important. In this episode we will look at making the model more realistic.