Page 34 - Winter 2011

Fig. 2. 22 June 1929 letter from Hollywood Bowl Association.
Vern Knudsen, a founder of the Acoustical Society of
America (ASA), was involved with many aspects of the field.
Among these were: Architectural Acoustics, Physical
Acoustics, Engineering Acoustics, Speech, Hearing, and
Underwater Acoustics. He is cited in many collections and
compilations, such as the Physical Acoustics series edited by
Warren Mason,5 and contributed articles and features for
trade magazines6 (as did Wallace Clement Sabine), popular
magazines,7 technical periodicals,8 proceedings, and special
9
lectures. Heisalsoknownforhistextbooks,notedabove,the
latter available from the Society. ECHOES, the Society’s newsletter, presented a cover story about Dr. Knudsen in 200410, which provided an excellent and concise review of the dates and highlights of his career. The encomiums offered when he received the Society’s Wallace C. Sabine medal in 1958 and the Gold Medal in 1967 (by Leo P. Delsasso), an honorary membership in 1952 and the John A. Potts (now Gold) Memorial Award in 1964 from the Audio Engineering Society, and from his appointment as Chancellor at UCLA in 1960, and the dedication of Knudsen Hall in 1964 (by Simon Ramo), are other resources11 that describe and enumerate Dr. Knudsen’s achievements and contributions.
We examine some of the history from the 1920’s to the 1970’s that is revealed in the first person narrative of Knudsen’s correspondence and other papers. In 1922 two events set the professional course for Vern O. Knudsen. These were a request by Professor Albert Michelson of the
University of Chicago, where Knudsen was finishing his doc- toral studies, “to look into the acoustics of a high school audi- torium in Chicago...and coincident with that, the collected papers of Wallace C. Sabine...had just been published. The reading of this book by Wallace C. Sabine was a turning point in my life...”12
Performance venues
The 1920’s were exciting times to be in Los Angeles. Los Angeles was becoming a modern city with the growth of the silent film industry. Civic organizations were also growing and the local Philharmonic, founded in 1919, initiated its official seasons at an outdoor venue called the Hollywood Bowl in 1922.
Dr. Knudsen, a freshly-minted Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, also arrived in 1922 to take on a faculty position at the UCSB, that is the University of California, Southern Branch, as it was known at the time—the small downtown Los Angeles campus on Vermont Avenue. Dr. Knudsen’s interest in acoustics became known and he was called in to help improve the acoustics at the Bowl after some renova- tions did not quell criticisms of the facility—some of which are still familiar to us today. In a letter from the Associated Architects Association of Los Angeles to Knudsen, the writer voiced the vain hope that some “plantings” might be used to solve the problems described therein. The wish for mitigation by foliage still finds root in the minds of many architects.
30 Acoustics Today, January 2011