The Acoustical Design of Concert Halls

A brief account is given of the early history of room acoustics and in particular W.C. Sabine's discovery of the importance of reverberation time on the acoustical quality of a room. There follows an account of later work, including that of the author, in which five other parameters, i.e. initial time delay, loudness, diffusion, spatial impression and early to late energy ratio, were identified as contributing to acoustical quality. The acoustical design of a number of halls after 1950 is discussed and an account is given of the history of the design of the Philharmonic Hall in the Lincoln Center up to the present time. Some attempts made by architects to break away from the safe shoe-boxed shape of hall are described and the acoustical consequences discussed. The success of four recently designed halls is shown to be the direct result of lessons learned both from experience in real halls and the fundamental research work mentioned in this paper. Finally, a brief account is given of the objective parameters that can now be measured in halls and which relate to subjective response.