An investigation of sound transmission into small enclosures considers the effects of acoustically induced coupling between shell modes. The level of cavity reactance is examined. The noise reductions for a closed cylinder and a rectangular parallelopiped enclosure (with a single flexible panel) placed in reverberant acoustic fields are computed and experimentally checked. The transmission by resonant and nonresonant shell modes is examined, especially in relation to the statistical‐energy‐analysis approach. The nature of the predominance of one type of transmission over the other is considered in relation to shell and cavity configurations and structural damping levels.