So I made a video to investigate the effects of path length differences in this binary scenario. One result is not necessarily better than another, but it’s good to make an informed choice.
Friday, March 27, 2020
Is it better to face your subs at the wall?
So I made a video to investigate the effects of path length differences in this binary scenario. One result is not necessarily better than another, but it’s good to make an informed choice.
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If I am being perfectly honest, this article was a little more technical than I had bargained for. However, it is one of the few articles that does not concern the effects of the novel coronavirus on the entertainment industry, which I feel that there is only so much to be said at this current time. I had seen speakers pointed at the wall in a show at Carnegie Mellon this year, which I only thought of passively, so I was interested to read about pointing a speaker or subwoofer at a wall and any potential effects that this would have on the final sound design. I was interested to read this because I thought the show at CMU that utilized this method was one of the best sounding shows that I had seen that year. I found the thoughtfulness in the explanation and the demonstration of concepts to be really informative. In a theatrical setting, I imagine wanting to implement something this way would require consultation with the scenery department in addition to people familiar with the venue itself.
Often when I see articles like this it reminds me of all the ways we can use the physics of a space, set, or material to produce an effect. Subwoofer placement and use has so much more to it than just providing low frequencies to a room. One show I worked on, we placed the subs underneath the audience risers, which created this awesome feeling during pivotal moments during the performance. For mid-range speakers, pointing them at the wall can create an ambiguity to the sound location, helping create an atmosphere for the audience where they aren't focused on the sound's source.
In this article, it really boils down to calculating impulse responses and comb filtering effects. The advantage of facing your speaker at the wall is that it gives you an additional throw distance twice that of the offset from the wall. This can shift the comb filtering, which as the author notes is neither good or bad, but needs to be gauged off the situation. In this example, it shifted the frequency response down, with a dip at around 89Hz. Again, this is just a statement of fact, it is up to the designer to consider whether this is good or bad.
Reading this article and watching the video associated with it reminded me just how much I miss physics and math classes now that I’m in drama school nearly full time. Too often, the arts and STEM fields are presented (especially to students) as a dichotomy, a binary choice that does not allow for intersections and interdisciplinary work. But for every theatrical designer, there’s someone behind them figuring out the science of the execution and how to work with the laws of physics to realize the designer’s ideas on stage. And similarly, math and science are brute force subjects until someone can distill them with elegance and poetry and put them into artful practice. Having an effective understanding of one area will inform and influence your work in the other, and I believe that only with an effective and artful combination and synthesis of art & science can we begin to do meaningful work.
It's refreshing to read an article that's not about the pandemic. And I have to say that this article exceeded my hopes. Not that it was the most thrilling piece of literature that I've read, but from the title I expected some narrow argument for why we should all be pointing subwoofers at the wall. The answer, of course, to the titular question is "it depends," and thankfully, that was the conclusion that the article drew as well. It's certainly a fun concept, especially for those that might be less familiar with some of the odd accoustic tricks that so often puts sound designers in opposition to Occam's Razor. Sound bouncing off of surfaces is so often the bane of the sound designers existence, and yet, depending on what you are trying to acccomplish, cleverly bouncing sound off of something occasionally is the right answer. Accoustics is a wild world.
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