The Longest Reverb

In 2014, acoustics expert Trevor Cox crawled through a narrow pipe into a subterranean oil tank in Inchindown, Scotland. One gunshot and 75 seconds later, he had set a new world record for the longest echo in a man-made structure. Learn more about reverberation time, and listen to the record-holding gunshot in the underground chamber.

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The Reverb Experiment: Facts and Figures

The Inchindown bombproof fuel oil tank was built over 80 years ago for the Royal Navy
The oil tank measures twice the length of a football pitch
The total reverberation time is 112 seconds
The world record reverberation time is 75 seconds*
The previous world record for a man-made structure was 15 seconds, which was also held by a structure in Scotland – the Hamilton Mausoleum in South Lanarkshire.

*According to the International Standards Organization (ISO), the definition of reverberation time is the time that a sound takes to decay until it is 60 dB below the level of the initial impulse sound.

Listen to Trevor Cox playing his saxophone with the world's longest echo:

Learn about Trevor Cox’s dedication to amazing sound phenomena in our expert profile article.

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