Sunday, November 02, 2008
Great Acoustic Expectations | Acoustic design for large performance spaces has come a long way | Oct 2008
Live Design: "Acoustic design for large performance spaces has come a long way. Concert halls and opera houses are being planned or built in Orlando, Las Vegas (really!), Kansas City, and Midland, TX, as well as in China, India, and the relatively stable parts of the Middle East. But will they sound substantially better than halls built 100 years ago? Of course, safety and air systems have improved. And the US has learned the lessons of “potty parity” — new halls are doubling the numbers of ladies' facilities over men's and adding many more than code minimum. (I have often remarked that going to a concert will be a failure acoustically, no matter how fabulous the hall, if the audience can't park and can't use the facilities in a timely fashion)."
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3 comments:
I think that the collabortaion on these kinds of big projects tends to get lost in the time crunch and budget. As much as the sound of the space has to be considered there has to be some give on both sides of the team, not just accomodation for the sound expert.
You're never going to get perfect sound out of a multi-purpose theatre space. There's only so much you can do to make the sound quality better, but there are so many other considerations which go into designing a building that sound cannot be the ruling factor, otherwise the space would not be functional. No matter how good our research and design gets, I don't think a space will ever have perfect acoustics.
The article makes many good points - acoustic engineering of spaces has become a much more advanced art in recent years. Still though, it seems like it is quite succeptable to the usual challenges of design by commite and self-defined experts. In the schools where I live, there have been quite a few theatres built recently. Each time it seems like the experts who design parts of the building are quite good, but administrators tend to mangle the designs in an attempt to compromise.
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