[Archived phorum post from squ1.com v2 by craines]

A post-grad paper is currently being finalised by a student at Cambridge who has looked at this aspect of acoustics and ECOTECT... I'm not exactly sure with what focus the dissertation has taken, but it may be of interest to you.
The following image is taken from the students model that she did as part of her work (with her permission of course):

Model by Emma Toogood :
MPhil student studying Environmental Design
at the Martin Centre, Cambridge UK.

Hopefully you can see how Emma has effectively taken a negative volume of the outside space between two Mayan Temples (the red lines are a cross section cut taken in OpenGL view). As I understand she used void, or near void materials on all the objest segments representing "outside", with a near 100 per cent absorbency, so that acoustic rays would be drawn but not reflected by those surfaces.

The inverse modelling is also necessary so that a volume can be defined, as this is essential for the acoustic calcs in ECOTECT.

Anyway, I thought this might help you.
Regards,
Caroline

Caroline Raines
Square One research Pty Ltd