028 INTERVIEW
Oslo Opera House
Kong are enabling clients and designers to listen to rooms and other aural environments before they are constructed. The purpose built labs are all floated rooms, with acoustic treatment, a large projector and screen, client facilities and use an Ambisonics surround-sound system to replay calibrated simulations using 12 Dynaudio BM5 speakers running off six Quad power amps. Rob comments: “If you look back on the last 60 years of acoustic design clients, users, donors, architects and many acoustic consultants have worried about how a building will sound when it is completed. So they have had to allow lengthy periods of testing and tuning and commissioning once a building is finished. And even then they can’t be sure that they will have a successful outcome.” The SoundLab fundamentally changes the paradigm by providing an accessible collaborative tool that allows clients to listen to a building before it’s built and understand how it will sound before it is built. It’s an exciting design environment where spaces for music, opera, theatre and dance can be created hand in hand with the users and the architectural team. It allows design choices to be made in the context of understanding what the building will sound like and can often lead to decisions to build with fewer materials for a more sustainable design. Most importantly it provides the best tool available anywhere in the world to increase design confidence in all aspects of performance arts buildings. Design and client teams often visit a series of halls at the very early stages of the design process. These visits are really valuable in understanding how the buildings work. But it is quite difficult to retain a memory of how the acoustics sound. Particularly when they reach the third or fourth hall of the tour process. The SoundLab allows designers to listen to a single piece of music or singing and move from hall to hall around the world with a single click of a mouse. Rob highlights: “So
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...clients can compare side by side spaces for music that are located thousands of miles apart, from America to Asia and Europe to Australasia...”
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for the first time clients can compare side by side spaces for music that are located thousands of miles apart, from America to Asia and Europe to Australasia in a single sitting in a single location. This was impossible to do before the invention of the SoundLab. And now all of these halls are kept in a database allowing comparisons to be made at any stage of the design process wherever you may be in the world. We can modify any aspects of the performance space design like the shape, the form, the geometry, the materials, and listen to the resulting differences in the room acoustics, at any musician location or any audience location.”
MODELLING INNOVATIONS Arup Acoustics is a practice that wants to pioneer at the frontiers of acoustic possibilities. Research and development is therefore critical to the practice. Of particular interest is research currently being made into creating virtual acoustics, being worked on by Iain Laird, a Graduate Engineer working part-time at Arup. Iain is researching into what he calls a ‘Virtual Performance Studio’ (VPS). He explains: “The idea is that a music college ought to be able to provide a rehearsal room to simulate a particular concert hall for students to practice in. Thus giving students realistic and inspiring acoustic environments to perform in. The idea will be that there will be a screen all the way around the room, and projectors. The lecturer would have a control panel to select an acoustic, say the Sydney Opera House, Oslo Opera House or Wigmore Hall. All the people in that room would hear the musician, quartet or orchestra as if they were playing in those halls. It will be very advanced processing because everything will be happening in real time.” The research is being undertaken in the Glasgow Arup SoundLab and in the Digital Design Studio (DDS), part of the Glasgow School of Art, and being academically supervised by Dr Damian Murphy from AudioLab, University of York and Dr Paul Chapman from DDS.
POSITIVE SOUND AND SONIC ART One of the major creative directions that the practice has been exploring in the last few years is into the fields of sonic art and the use of positive sound. Arup Acoustics has been in dialogue with the Institute of Acoustics and the Royal Institute of British Architects on new ways of approaching noise in the environment. As designers, acousticians working with buildings have spent years trying to get rid of noise (unwanted sound). There is a train of thought in contemporary thinking that says this is the wrong approach. Arup have been working with clients such as Leeds City Council and the GLA in London. Both are interested in making external aural environments more pleasant. There is a huge
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