[robomartin]

A couple of decades back I was very involved with work that required paying attention to acoustics.

I remember building this room with walls lined with 1 foot thick Helmholtz resonators tuned to a range of frequencies. The same with portions of the ceiling. And, of course, there were broken-up and angled surfaces to help diffuse sound, avoid creating standing waves and stimulation of room modes. Back then I even wrote a bunch of software to run acoustics analysis and evaluate room characteristics based on a range of parameters, including construction materials, etc.

Here are a couple of screen shots:

https://i.imgur.com/sXQmc8d.png

https://i.imgur.com/q0kHVbQ.png

Since then I have always been very aware of acoustics in every environment. Restaurants are particularly horrendous. Nearly all of them seem to be reverberation chambers designed to destroy sound. Most would benefit greatly by deploying a few very simple tools to control sound and allow patrons to have conversations in a reasonable environment.