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Description
Teaching (room) acoustics to (under)graduate students is generally considered a challenge for many reasons. Firstly, acoustics theory is quite technical and mathematical by nature, and is therefore often perceived as quite abstract by many students. Secondly, acoustics theory does not naturally lend itself to visual representations when compared to, for instance, architectural design, or other courses in their curriculum. Therefore, in acoustics education, the main challenge is to make abstract concepts tangible for the students, while at the same time keeping the solution affordable.This paper presents the use of the Community Hub for Open-source Room Acoustics Software (CHORAS) in an educational context. CHORAS is a web-based user interface that allows users to run room acoustics simulations using open-source simulation packages as developed in the research community. Users provide room geometries, source/receiver positions, and material properties. CHORAS then provides an impulse response, which can be auralized by the interface, as well as room acoustic parameters, including T30, D50 and C80. CHORAS was used during one bachelor’s and one master’s course at the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). Students created their geometry from scratch based on an existing space in which they carried out room acoustics measurements, and used the outputs provided by CHORAS to iteratively improve upon this.