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As Charles Garnier prepared the design for the Paris Opera House in 1861, the lack of acoustical design information and the contradictory nature of the information that he found forced him to leave the acoustic quality to chance and hope for the best. With few exceptions, this was the condition of architectural acoustics at the beginning of the 20th century. In 1900, with the pioneering work of Wallace Clement Sabine, the dark mysteries of “good acoustics” began to be illuminated. In his efforts to remedy the poor acoustics in the Fogg Art Museum Lecture Hall (1895–1973) at Harvard University, Sabine began experiments that revealed the relationship among the architectural materials of a space, the physical volume of the space, and the time that sound would persist in the space after a source was stopped (the reverberation time). Predicting the reverberation time of a room provided the first scientific foundation for reliable acoustic design in architecture. This method is still regularly used as a benchmark to design a range of listening environments, from concert halls to school classrooms.

The first application of this new acoustical knowledge occurred during the design of the Boston Symphony Hall (1906) by McKim, Mead and White. Original plans for the hall called for an enlarged version of the Leipzig Neues Gewandhaus (1884), a classical Greek Revival theater. The increased size would have been acoustically inappropriate, as it doubled the room volume, leading to excessive reverberation. Sabine worked with the architects to develop a scheme with a smaller room volume in the traditional “shoe box” concert hall shape. The Boston Symphony Hall remains one of the best in the world. Adler and Sullivan’s Auditorium Building (1889) in Chicago was praised for its architectural and engineering achievements as well as for the theater’s superb acoustics. As the profession of acoustical consulting emerged in the design of listening spaces, the firm of Bolt, Beranek and Newman made a significant impact on the development of architectural acoustics in the 20th century. Their work with architects Harrison and Abramovitz on Avery Fisher Hall (1962) in New York City represented a legitimate attempt to incorporate new scientific principles of acoustical design rather than merely copying previous halls that were known to be good. Although it presented several failures, one key acoustic point gleaned from a study of European halls for Avery Fisher Hall was that the room should hold 1,400 to 1,800 seats. Yielding to economic pressures, the architect increased seating to almost 3,000.

A more successful implementation of modern acoustical theories is the Berlin Philharmonic (1963). Architect Hans Scharoun’s vision of a hall in the round blurs the traditional distinction between performer and audience. The approach posed quite an acoustical challenge, given the directionality of many orchestral instruments; it required an extremely unconventional acoustical design. The resulting “vineyard terrace” seating arrangement resolved many potential acoustical difficulties while creating a spatial vitality that resonates outward to form the profile of the building. This collaboration between Scharoun and the acoustic consultant Lothar Cremer engendered a truly inspired architectural design.

A more successful implementation of modern acoustical theories is the Berlin Philharmonic (1963). Architect Hans Scharoun’s vision of a hall in the round blurs the traditional distinction between performer and audience. The approach posed quite an acoustical challenge, given the directionality of many orchestral instruments; it required an extremely unconventional acoustical design. The resulting “vineyard terrace” seating arrangement resolved many potential acoustical difficulties while creating a spatial vitality that resonates outward to form the profile of the building. This collaboration between Scharoun and the acoustic consultant Lothar Cremer engendered a truly inspired architectural design.

New techniques for improved acoustic environments are applied in many building types, including school classrooms, music practice rooms, church sanctuaries, movie heaters, transportation hubs, and industrial facilities. Simultaneously, with more and more exposure to digital-quality sound, clients have become keenly aware of their sonic environment and expect high levels of performance. Speech intelligibility in classrooms has been related to learning, with efforts to reduce excessive background noise from mechanical equipment. The issue has become the focus of a U.S. federal government assessment and proposal for a nationwide acoustical standard for schools. Additionally, careful selection of materials, their quantities, and their locations in classrooms are important to enhance speech intelligibility. Music practice spaces require adequate room volume with both soundabsorbent and sound-diffusing materials to control loudness and reduce the risk of noise-induced hearing loss to musicians and teachers. Religious liturgy relies more heavily on intimate spoken sermons, cathedral-like choir singing, and high-powered amplified music in many denominations. These trends, coupled with a prevailing increase in sanctuary size and the desire for more congregational interaction, have demanded sophisticated sound reinforcement systems and carefully configured room acoustic design strategies to strike a balance among divergent sonic criteria. Digital surround sound, the new standard in movie theater entertainment, incorporates the environmental acoustic character as part of the movie sound track, which should not be colored by the theater space. This requires very low reverberance, low background noise levels from mechanical equipment, and exceptional sound isolation from adjacent theaters. Unintelligible announcements, the bane of transportation hubs, have been the focus of many recent acoustical studies, affirming the need to consider room geometry, size, and material selection as they play as great a role as the actual announcement system itself in the success of these spaces.

Many meaningful advances in acoustic knowledge were made in the 20th century. The application and integration of this information within architectural design leaves much room for advancement. Alvar Aalto’s famous acoustical ray tracing diagrams for the lecture room of the Viipuri Public Library (1933–35) in Viipuri, Finland, represent acoustical thinking in the earliest phases of design. Developing sophisticated methods to assimilate newer acoustical knowledge as part of the architectural design process is the work at hand in the 21st century.