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Rooms and reverberation
A room is part of every performance. The sound reaches you first directly, and then many more times as it bounces off the walls, the floor and the ceiling. The time a sound takes to fade away after the player stops is called the reverberation time. Around 1900 the physicist Wallace Sabine worked out that it grows with the volume of the room and gets shorter the more the surfaces absorb, with curtains, seats or people. Good concert halls for orchestral music have about two seconds. A small carpeted room has much less, and a stone church can have several seconds, which changes how fast you can play.