Concert Hall Acoustics

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Acoustics may be defined as the scientific study of sound. Acoustics deals with vibration energy: how it is generated, transmitted and received. This covers a broad range of fields, such as speech and hearing but also underwater acoustics, structural acoustics, biomedical ultrasound, and much more. The main focus of my presentation today will be on concert hall acoustics. In Concert Acoustics vibrations start up in the form of sound waves, which travel around the room, getting reflected, absorbed or transmitted at the walls or boundaries of the room. For a good concert hall, it is important then to consider the shape and size of the room as well as its material properties. What do you notice about the sound quality when you are listening to a concert in your favourite hall? Is it clear, dry, intimate, warm, fuzzy, brilliant, or is it loud? Acousticians have compiled a list of acoustic qualities that are considered to be the most important in concert hall acoustics: * Reverberation * Clarity * Intimacy * Warmth and Brilliance * Loudness * Spaciousness * Background Noise REVERBERATION A sound created in a big hall will persist by repeated reflection from the wall until it is reduced to a value where it is no longer audible. The repeated reflections that results in this persistence of sound are called reverberation. In a small conference room, however, the sound does not linger but decays very rapidly. Longer reverberation generally accentuates music, but can cause speech to be muddled. For concert halls, musicians will often refer to a reverberant space as being very "live". If there is not very much sound reverberation, a hall may be referred to as being "dead". Wallace Clement Sabine was the first to quantify this subjective quality in the early 1900s. He developed the quantity Reverberation Time (RT), which is defined as the time
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