The attenuation of sound propagated out-of-doors is conveniently separated into attenuation due to spherical divergence and excess attenuation due to atmospheric and terrain effects. This excess attenuation is principally caused by sound absorption in the air, the refractive effects of temperature and wind gradients, by turbulence and the effects of terrain and ground cover. To investigate these effects the propagation of sound over open, level ground, through dense evergreen forests, and between hilltops was studied experimentally in the frequency range between about 300 cps and 5000 cps. Extensive micrometeorological instrumentation was utilized to measure and record the relevant micrometeorological parameters simultaneously with the acoustic data for a wide variety of weather conditions. Data on the attenuation of the mean received sound pressure level as well as on the fluctuations about the mean were obtained and correlated with the state of the atmosphere. Over open level terrain, the excess attenuation upwind was found to exceed that for downwind propagation by as much as 25–30 db for source and receiver heights of 12 and 5 ft, respectively. Temperature and wind gradients near the ground-air interface largely account for this difference. In hilltop-to-hilltop propagation, wind direction is of secondary importance, and in dense woods absorption and scattering control. Empirical functions were derived for the purpose of estimating the mean excess attenuation as a function of frequency and distance, for a given set of micrometeorological conditions. These charts have been found useful in many practical problems involving the propagation of sound over open level ground.

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Outdoor sound communication systems for urban areas have been traditionally designed using relatively few sources of sound, located high above the buildings. Results have generally not been satisfactory because of sound attenuation in the atmosphere and diffraction by buildings. As an alternative, a block by-block coverage system using many sound sources placed in the streets has been investigated. Extensive acoustical and meteorological field tests carried out in city streets showed that sound-propagation conditions are generally favorable there. Typically, the mean wind and temperature gradients are small; consequently, no appreciable sound refraction effects were observed over distances of a city block or two when sound was propagated from a source 10–20 ft above the pavement. Reverberation from the building walls was not detrimental to speech intelligibility when a directive sound source was used with its axis oriented along the street. However, the intelligibility of speech received in a side street some distance away from the intersection was poor owing to excessive sound attenuation and reverberation.

The variation of the sound pressure along the auditory canal was determined experimentally on a number of subjects, male and female, placed in a progressive sound field. This was accomplished by insertion of a small flexible probe microphone at various positions along the auditory canal. The subjects were placed in front of a loudspeaker in a room free from acoustic wall reflections. The free sound field at the subjects' location was essentially that of a plane progressive wave. The measurements were carried out over the significant range of audiofrequencies for various orientations in azimuth of the subjects with respect to the sound source. The sound pressure at the eardrum is found to be greater than the free-field pressure. The average ratio of these two quantities is a function of frequency, and reaches values of about 20 db in the vicinity of 3000 c.p.s. The human ear is thus an effective acoustic “amplifier.” The increase in sound pressure at the eardrum over the free-field pressure is caused by a combination effect of diffraction by the head and pinna and resonance in the auditory canal. The measurements of the sound pressures at several other positions along the auditory canal serve to separate these two phenomena to a certain extent and to furnish additional information about the pressure distribution. Most of the data were obtained with a group of male subjects, but measurements on a few women did not show any marked discrepancies.