The Acoustics of the Concert Hall

From shoe boxes to vineyards, how reverberation has shaped what listeners hear.

Related

BaroqueRomanticReverbOrgan

The question

The same orchestra can sound like two different orchestras in two different halls. Listeners hear not only instruments but the way walls, floor and air return the sound.

Historical arc

Eighteenth-century halls were mostly rectangular shoe boxes, and Leipzig, Vienna and Amsterdam all relied on those proportions. In 1900 Boston's Symphony Hall asked Wallace Sabine to calculate seating and absorption from reverberation time, giving hall design its first formula. In 1963 Berlin's Philharmonie wrapped terraced seating around the orchestra, with Lothar Cremer advising on acoustics. Multi-purpose halls often disappointed afterwards, and Los Angeles in 2003 and Hamburg in 2017 returned to rooms built for sound.

The turning point

Acoustics became calculable, then returned to listening. Too much reverberation blurs, too little dries; lateral reflections and early decay resist numbers yet decide whether a hall feels intimate or distant.

What to listen for

Start with Handel's fireworks music, written for a large band outdoors with no hall to borrow. Then Parsifal, whose covered pit at Bayreuth hides the orchestra under the voices. Hear Beethoven's Fifth in ensemble, the shoe-box hall gluing strings and timpani together. Finally the 1812 Overture, which wants a square, bells and cannon.

Related

See Reverb and Room Mode, the era in Romantic, and the church acoustic in Organ.

Sources

• Leo Beranek, Concert Halls and Opera Houses (Springer) — acoustic data checked, not quoted
• The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., entry "Acoustics" — history checked, not quoted

Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.