Via (always awesome) Follow Me Here, a nifty article on the acoustics of concert hall design. Creating a large space suitable for classical performances of all kinds is a task that seems more of an art than science. The career-denting tale of Beranek’s failure at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall is told. During my tour of Lincoln Center (that would be a regular tourist type tour, not, alas, a concert tour), the guide explained how the hall was encapsulated away from the outer walls so that street noise would not penetrate. And she also described the various solutions they had tried in their attempts to fix the acoustical problems, one of which was a set of “clouds” hanging from the ceiling. Controlling reverberation is the key to a good hall design. At MIT’s Kresge Auditorium, they have a system of microphones hanging from the ceiling on long cords above the orchestra. The microphones were spaced only a few feet apart and there were a lot of them. And we often set them swaying back and forth with an accidental (usually!) whack of a violin bow. The sound gathered by the mikes was played back on a slight delay to create an artificial reverb. Supposedly it worked quite well, but I haven’t been in the audience for a concert to hear it myself. I just remember thinking “it figures that MIT used an electronic solution.”