The acoustical design of Xiamen University Concert Hall

Abstract

Xiamen University is located in the Fujian Province, South East of China. Xiamen University Concert Hall is the essential musical education site for the college students, as well as for holding important meetings. The concert hall has 560 seats. It has a comparatively long reverberation time to offer a fullness and reverberant sound field for music performance. At the same time, rich early reflections from the ceiling and the side walls together with the enough signal to noise ratio guarantee speech intelligibility when using a loudspeaker system. With this conception in the acoustical design of the concert hall, the use of changeable absorptive components was avoided which may influence the brightness and liveness of the chamber music hall. After the completion of the building, acoustical measurements were taken and the measurement results are also given in this paper. Since autumn 2010 when the concert hall was finished, music performance and meeting events have been successfully held in the hall. It has become the main hall for the musical education and performance, as well as the meeting center for the college.