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A concrete beam is embedded with cables, speakers, and microphones and presses its mass upon six acoustic foam cushions.

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From 1895 to 1898, a team of researchers at Harvard University moved seat cushions between two lecture halls throughout the night many hundreds of times in order to conduct sonic experiments.

Their efforts resulted in the publication of a formula which allowed for a room’s reverberation time to be accurately calculated.

The Sabine equation can be used to claim that the presence of six seat cushions is acoustically equivalent to one human body—the installation, however, attempts to materialize some of what the formula does not factor into its definition of acoustics.