Acoustic design and evaluation of a multi-purpose hall of a new conference centre

Abstract

At Forum Acusticum 2005 the building and room acoustic design of a new Conference Centre was presented. Since then the construction work has been finished and the Centre is now open. The Conference Centre itself is a multi-functional building, having three wings of different functions. The Main Hall of the Centre is a room for 750 people which can be extended with adjacent section rooms for 1100 persons, giving a total volume of 14000 m3. It was designed to host conferences, lectures, and - most of the time - to be used as a concert hall. The extremely different acoustical demands of being a concert hall and a lecture room had been fulfilled with appropriate room acoustic design and with variable acoustics by employing a DCR (Digital Control of Reverberation) system. In this paper we give a report on the achieved acoustical performance of the Main Hall of the Conference Centre. We have performed extensive room acoustic measurements in the Main Hall, the results of which are compared to the designed values and are presented in this paper. The design of the DCR system is discussed in a different paper.