The eighth annual Fairey lecture: The acoustics of auditoria

Abstract

I am going to talk about the acoustics of auditoria : more specifically, about the acoustics of rooms used for music (concert-halls, etc.) and of rooms used for speech (theatres, etc.), and of rooms used for both, multi-purpose auditoria. I am not going to talk about studios and cinemas, for the simple reason that I know little about them. But is there any point in discussing the acoustics of the concert-hall, the opera house and the theatre? Ever since the gramophone was invented it has been predicted that it would be the death of concert-halls, and then the cinema was to be the death of the theatre, and radio a threat to both concert-hall and theatre. And lastly, television. Of course there is no doubt that the new media have had a great effect, but they have not killed the old. I do not know of any official statistics, but probably the number of theatres has declined (I read recently that Manchester had twelve theatres in 1904 but it still has six) and many new ones have been built. There never were many concert-halls, but I am sure there has been a big increase in concert-going. For instance, in London before the war the main halls were the Royal Albert Hall (Figure l), the Queen’s Hall and the Wigmore Hall. The Queen’s Hall was destroyed in the war (incidentally its acoustics were not particularly good: there is nothing like getting burnt down as a way to get a good posthumous reputation for acoustics), but has been replaced by the Royal Festival Hall (Figure 2), which seats 50 % more than the Queen’s Hall did, and-more significant-has a concert virtually every day of the week (two or three on some days) compared with the three or four a week in the season at the old Queen’s Hall. The Wigmore Hall is still going strong, and so is the Albert Hall (with acoustical improvements). This hall has about the same number of concerts as before the war, but the Promenade concerts are now held there with much larger audiences than before the war. And in addition since the war, in London, there have been built the large Fairfield Hall in Croydon, the Queen Elizabeth Hall (Figure 3), and the Purcell Room, and a 2000-seat concert-hall is to be built in the Barbican. Note that these post-war concert-halls have been built by local authorities, and I suppose that no concert-hall or opera house of the future will ever be built as a purely commercial venture, and the majority of new theatres and new multi-purpose auditoria will be built with public money or with money from a trust, for example the Nuffield theatre here. This is all part of the general trend of more public spending on the arts, but it seems to me that it is a continuation of a very ancient tradition. I do not know who paid for the ancient Greek theatres, or for the Colosseum in Rome but I doubt if they were purely commercial ventures. Of course many factors have influenced what changes there have been in theatre and concert going, but as far as acoustics are concerned, it seems to me that the cinema and television