Modeling chairs and occupants to closely approximate the sound absorption of occupied full scale theatre chairs

The present work reports on the process of modeling chairs and occupants to closely approximate the sound absorption of occupied full scale theatre chairs and explains how the best form of model listener was determined. Modifying the form of the model listeners to have shorter upper legs and narrower lower legs, led to improved agreement between model and full scale occupied chairs at all frequencies including at 125 Hz. The measured absorption coefficients of single blocks of model chairs with or without model listeners agreed well with the measured values for both full scale types E and G chairs. However, the estimated values for larger sample blocks of model chairs with P/A = 0.5 m−1 showed better agreement with the measured values for full scale type G chairs than type E chairs due to the different slopes of the regression lines versus P/A. The present results demonstrate that the model chair and listener accurately simulate the sound absorption characteristics of a particular type of quite absorptive full scale occupied chairs for all sample sizes of the full scale chairs.