Statistical Properties of Reverberant Sound Fields

Reverberant sound fields are used in several standard acoustical measurements, in which the sound field is sampled at different points. Here, the distributions of such sampled values are considered for the reverberant sound fields derived from different types of signal. It is shown that the values approach equality only where the field contains many frequency components simultaneously. For finite numbers of components, exact expressions in closed form are found for the distributions. For the field derived from a single frequency component, the values of mean‐squared pressure follow a gamma distribution. For two or more frequency components of different mean amplitude, the distribution is related to a gamma distribution, and some computed values of it are given for the case of two components. Some experimental data are given. The results bear on the accuracy to be expected in reverberant field measurements.