Science And Music: Raising The Roof

When studying Physics of Music, I was interested to research the topic of sound reflection in a theatre as I work at the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre and wanted to research the acoustics in a theatre. In this paper, I will be using published articles to research the relationship of how people in the theatre receive sound and how the actors are able to portray sound in their space.

In the research from Michael Barron’s Science & Music: Raising the Roof he is able to explain how sound travels using localization and reverberation. The explanation of how sound travels can be determined by localization explained as “we are listening to speech or music, which have short elements such as syllables or notes that vary with time. Our brains use this time-varying information to extract where the initial sound comes from.” (Barron, 859). This will help people to focus who are

listening to the play in a theatre whether they are sitting in the first row or the last because we will turn our attention to the actors who are producing the initial sound.

Barron also mentions reverberation explains as “the duration of sound persistence, or reverberation time, is proportional to the volume of the space divided by the amount of sound absorbing material.” (Barron, 860). This is important because the Royal Manitoba Theatre’s architecture allows for the reverberation to bounce off the walls because of size of the space and the audience as the sound absorbing material. Reverberation explains how the sound can reach a large amount of people in the audience at once because of the sound reflecting from the walls and we as the audience can absorb the sound no matter where we are in the theatre. The realization that sound reflects off of the space allowing for optimal sound to be absorbed by the audience the article describes

being able to build seating that allowed for the best acoustics to travel described as “The terraced hall subdivides the audience into different seating levels with useful sound reflecting surfaces in between. These are often referred to as vineyard terraces, as on a hillside.” (Barron, 860). The establishment of receiving optimal sound allowed for the best experience in the concert hall. In the article, Barron listed factors that the listener received as the optimal experience explained as “...clarity, or ability to hear musical detail; reverberance, or being able to hear reverberations; acoustic intimacy, which describes how involved we seem to be in the performance; envelopment, the extent to which we feel surrounded by sound, and loudness.” (Barron, 860).