| Smart Sound Room: The Smart Sound Room is the center of action in the media component of the Sound Lab. You can place up to ten smart rooms. With the Select tool, you can move and resize Smart Sound Rooms. You cannot make smart rooms smaller than the source and detector objects (point sources, speakers, and microphones) they contain or the distances between those objects. There is no practical limit on smart room size. One Smart Sound Room may fill the entire simulation window (or more) or barely wrap itself around a point source. In the Smart Sound Room's Properties Box, you can choose the medium in the room. The default medium is water, but you can change that to steel, air, mercury, aluminum, granite, helium, carbon dioxide, or vacuum. You can also choose one or more walls for total reflection of incident waves (default is total absorption). For the rendering of simulation results, you can have the simulator draw wave patterns and not show animation. These are the default choices. In nearly all circumstances, you will want to observe the wave patterns in the Smart Sound Room. Only in special cases, such as moving sources or echoes, will waves emerging from the smart room not sound and look like the waves pumped into the room. You must draw wave patterns to animate them, but you don't need animation to draw wave patterns. Animation is computationally expensive and takes time. You may want to refrain from animating wave patterns unless you are simulating transient states (like moving sources or echoes) or periodic phenomena with frequencies of a few Hertz or less (like beats). If you choose animation, you can set the Smart Sound Room's simulation run properties: the begin time, the end time, and frames per second (for animation). These properties can also be set "simulator-wide" in Sound Lab's background properties, which makes it easy to coordinate smart room animations with the playing of the Tape Recorder. The Smart Sound Room is one of three media rooms used in the Waves & Sound simulators.