Home Studio Basics Part 1: Reverberation and Absorption

One of the most important considerations in setting up a home studio is the acoustics, or the way the sound behaves. Acoustic treatment isn’t as exciting as new plugins or flying faders, but it’s easily one of the most important investments you’ll make as a composer.

Introduction to Acoustics

Acoustics is the study of how sound acts in an environment. Obviously, something must move in physical space in order to cause air molecules to begin vibrating. Once the air is vibrating, this energy, called acoustic energy, is passed to the other air molecules.

This acoustic energy interacts with all the other physical things in the environment (even you!). This interaction between acoustic energy and other objects in the surrounding environment can be separated into two categories: reverberation and absorption.

Reverberation

Reverberation, typically just called reverb, happens as acoustic energy interacts with physical things (we can simulate this interaction via reverb plugins in our DAW). These interactions can occur in four ways: reflection, deflection, refraction, and diffraction.

The more of these interactions we can hear, the more “live” a room sounds. The more we remove these interactions, the more it creates a “dead” room. All real environments are live to some extent, even outdoor environments.

Since our audience will be listening to our music in a real environment (one with natural reverb), we want a studio that sounds live. (The only place in the studio we want to create a dead room is in an isolation booth — this is because it’s easier to add reverb than it is to remove it. We also want to remove the reverb when we’re editing, as having the reverb present makes precision edits more difficult, and reverb naturally occurs during playback.)

The easiest — and most budget-conscious — way to remove the reverb from our audio studio is to use headphones. (Check out our recommendations for high-quality, affordable headphones here.)

Using headphones will minimize the interactions of the acoustics and isolate the sound, letting you hear the signal at its best quality. When you’re recording a sound or editing a sound, headphones are the best way to be really sure of what’s being done to the audio signal.

However, unless you expect your audience to listen to your sound only with headphones (not likely!), it’s best to mix and master your work in your studio space, since this is more realistic to how your audience is going to hear the sound.

Absorption

Absorption is the act of dampening the acoustic energy. As you might expect, this is relative to the softness of the surface (like bouncing a basketball on concrete vs. on a carpet).

To see how reverberation and absorption factor into studio design from a practical perspective, check out Home Studio Basics Part 2: Studio Setup.

Tom St. James is an award-winning composer, songwriter, sound designer, and audio engineer. He owns the studio BASSIC Productions as well as other sound and music-related businesses. Tom teaches audio and music. He also writes training material for colleges, music schools, audio studios, and blogs.