Sabine was born in Albion, Illinois, to Methodist pastor Charles and Rebecca Likely née McClure.
He taught physics for a while and in 1919 he replaced his cousin Wallace Clement Sabine (who died from cancer) as director of the Riverbank Acoustical Laboratories (which later became a part of the Illinois Institute of Technology).
He developed the work of his cousin and specialized in acoustic architecture and was a consultant for architects and involved in the design of the Radio City Music Hall, New York; Fels Planetarium, Philadelphia; and the House and Senate Chambers.
[4][5][6][7][8] A porous gypsum plaster to line walls and meant to absorb sounds was developed in 1924 by the Keasbey Mattison laboratories and marketed as Sabinite.
After his retirement in 1947 he moved to Colorado Springs and spent a lot of time on Christianity and its relationship to science which he wrote about in Atoms, Men and God (1953).