Page 30 - Spring2019

Kelsey A. Hochgraf
Address:
Acentech 33 Moulton Street Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138 USA
Email:
khochgraf@acentech.com
The Art of Concert Hall Acoustics: Current Trends and Questions in Research and Design
Concert hall design exists at the intersection of art, science and engineering, where acousticians continue to demystify aural excellence.
What defines “excellence” in concert hall acoustics? Acousticians have been seek- ing perceptual and physical answers to this question for over a century. Despite the wealth of insightful research and experience gained in this time, it remains es- tablished canon that the best concert halls for classical orchestral performance are the Vienna Musikverein (1870), Royal Concertgebouw in Amsterdam (1888), and Boston Symphony Hall (1900; Beranek, 2004). Built within a few decades of each other, the acoustical triumph of these halls is largely attributable to their fortuitous “shoebox” shape and emulation of other successful halls. Today, we have a signifi- cantly more robust understanding of how concert halls convey the sounds of musi- cal instruments, and we collect tremendous amounts of perceptual and physical data to attempt to explain this phenomenon, but in many respects, the definition of excellence remains elusive.
This article discusses current trends in concert hall acoustical design, including topics that are well understood and questions that have yet to be answered, and challenges the notion that “excellence” can be defined by a single room shape or set of numerical parameters.
How Should a Concert Hall Sound?
This is the fundamental question asked at the outset of every concert hall project, but it is surprisingly difficult to answer succinctly. The primary purpose of a con- cert hall is to provide a medium for communication between musicians and the audience (Blauert, 2018). There are several percepts of the acoustical experience, different for musicians and listeners, that are critical for enabling this exchange. On stage, musicians need good working conditions so that they hear an appropri- ate balance of themselves, each other, and the room. For a listener in the audience, articulating the goals is more difficult.
Listeners want to be engaged actively by the music, but the acoustical implications of this goal are complex and highly subjective. This question has been the focus of rich and diverse research for decades, including notable contributions by Beranek (1962, 1996, 2004; summarized in a previous issue of Acoustics Today by Markham, 2014), Hawkes and Douglas (1971), Schroeder et al. (1974), Soulodre and Bradley (1995), and Lokki et al. (2012) among others. These studies have established a com- mon vocabulary of relevant perceptual characteristics and have attempted to distill the correlation between listener preference and perception to a few key factors, but it remains true that acoustical perception in concert halls is multidimensional. Kuusinen and Lokki (2017) recently proposed a “wheel of concert hall acoustics,”
https://doi.org/10.1121/AT.2019.15.1.31
28 | Acoustics Today | Spring 2019 | volume 15, issue 1 ©2019 Acoustical Society of America. All rights reserved.