Architectural acoustics contribute significantly to the enjoyment of music. This is due to the relationship between a song and its intended performance venue. With the proper balance of acoustical intimacy and aliveness, performance venues are designed to accentuate the characteristics of symphonic music and provide the best listening experience possible. After enduring centuries of trial and error, acousticians have developed several methods for building concert halls. These techniques are used today in an attempt to modernize the critically acclaimed "shoebox" design while maintaining its strengths. All this has been done in an effort to apply science to the art of acoustics.
Importance of Architectural Acoustics
Kölner Philharmonie, Cologne
Photo by Leonard Lutz
Consider listening to the normally crisp sound of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony in a cavern. While the unusual setting might draw an interested crowd, the very first garbled phrase makes it abundantly obvious why the disruptive echoes of a cave are unsuited for symphonic music.
Architectural acoustics have an enormous impact on the way listeners enjoy music. While the cave example is a bit extreme, you may have noticed through personal experience that some music simply sounds better in certain environments. What might be surprising is that this environmental bias is written into music. For example, centuries-old organ music sounds best in the reverberant stone walls of a cathedral. Since most organs were found in massive churches at that time, contemporaneous composers wrote music specifically tuned to the giant stone cathedral. Quite simply, the style of music was partially dictated by the performance venue (Rothstein). This has always been the case, whether the music was written for a Baroque court or an outdoor amphitheater (Rybczynski).
Since music is tied to a performance venue, the challenge for modern architectural acoustics is to develop concert halls that accentuate the characteristics of a given style of music. This is made all the more challenging because music appreciation is very subjective and difficult to characterize quantitatively. With a better understanding of the human ear and the movement of sound, experts endeavor to apply science to the art of acoustics.
Historical Investigations in Acoustics
Acoustics were first studied by the Greek philosopher Vitruvius. During this time, the primary performance venue was the outdoor amphitheater, predecessor to the Coliseum in Rome. The logic behind this design was that sound travels in concentric circles rising away from the performer. While there is some scientific truth to this conclusion, it was based on an underlying belief that architecture tapped into some deep cosmological harmony. Another conclusion concerning the nature of acoustics includes the hypothesis that designing a theater in the shape of a bell would allow it to resonate as such. Curiously, designers even proposed that concert halls, like wine, mature over time (Zhang).
Eventually, when many scientific attempts to accurately understand and manipulate sound failed to revolutionize architectural acoustics, concert hall design began to focus on replicating successful precedents with only minor modifications. One of the designs that resulted from this trial and error process is known as the "shoebox" shaped concert hall. This design is characterized by a rectangular shape that is 50 to 80 feet wide, where the orchestra sits at one end and performs for a relatively small audience of floor seats. The shoebox appears in both the Vienna Grosser Musikvereinssaal (1890) and the Amsterdam Concertgebouw (1888), considered the two best concert halls in the world (Rybczynski).
If these two auditoriums set the standard, one might wonder what it is about that design that makes it so ideal for orchestral and symphonic music. Acoustic experts have struggled for the last century to define these favorable characteristics and apply them to architecturally distinct venues that hold larger audiences.
