Sound & Communication: As integrators, we are somewhat limited in what the technology we integrate can do to improve intelligibility in the case of poor room acoustics. We should know what type of acoustic space we are dealing with before specifying and installing equipment. One room characteristic that wreaks havoc on intelligibility is RT. If, prior to deployment, we're able to measure the room's RT60
3 comments:
The idea of the Gymnasium Effect is very interesting to me as it is something I have actually worked a decent amount of time on. At my Highschool, we did not have a theater or proper auditorium that held the entire student body, faculty and staff. For this reason, every first Monday of the month, we had an all school assembly in the gymnasium. Now, our gymnasium was setup with two sets of bleachers on each side of the gym, and one central speaker cluster with speakers pointing in all four directions. Now, this worked fine for games, however, we only used on side of the bleachers for assemblies, thus three out of the four speakers in the cluster weren't even pointing at the people. For this reason, sound was terrible. As it was stated in the article, sound was bouncing off the floor, the ceiling and the walls, creating all kinds of delay and echos. Fortunately, I was able to work with a sound company and design a new system that got implement just a couple years after leaving.
This is remarkably interesting and something I never considered before. Luckily, I also thought this article was not too dense. Often, I find articles like these dense to read and get lost in the mumbo jumbo speak as the article describes what I am unable to understand. I think the personal tid-bits about children and gymnasiums was very well put and actually had me thinking too. Sometimes I have found myself in a situation where the ambient chaos is distracting my ears from hearing what is actually coming very clearly and directly at me. Other times I get frustrated because my ears are annoyed with the amount of times something has entered my ear. For those reasons I take counter measures but that is irrelevant here. I think this article hits a unique point though. Considering the room and putting in intelligible design is a very important thing to focus on and its true of more than just sound but especially true for sound.
Gymnasiums and auditoriums are the Achilles heel for most small regional and community theatres across the country. In fact, I've been asked to design a show that is in an old armory building, with all the acoustical problems one would expect from a civil-war era armory. Everyone that has ever been in these situations probably hears Gregorian chant reverberating in their brains, since that is really the one thing people associate with endless reverb (that and the halo theme). Sometimes there is nothing like almost indefinite reverb on a piece, but in our world that is never the case for an entire production. We move at such a lighting pace with dialog, lyrics, and musical expression that you lose entire phrases with reverb like this. Not only that, it gets really loud! Combatting this should probably fall into the hands of professionals, since acoustics are one of those half artistry/half science disciplines that only a few pros understand.
Post a Comment