Auditorium Acoustics and Architectural Design

Part 1 Sound and rooms: the essence of sound waves; the nature of music and speech sounds; sound propagation; sound in rooms; reflections and the ear; sound propagation in detail; acoustic defects; sound level distribution. Part 2 Acoustics for the symphony concert hall: the subjective dimension; objective descriptions; size, volume and form; early reflection design; balconies and other modulations; design for the performers, A.C.Gade; acoustic modelling; objective characteristics. Part 3 The development of the concert hall: early developments; the classical rectangular concert hall; the directed sound hall; the fan-shaped hall; the synthesis in British post-war halls; the diffuse solution; a subdivided acoustic space?; the terraced concert hall; the lateral directed reflection sequence hall; concert hall design in the 80s. Part 4 12 British concert halls and concert hall acoustics: Royal Albert Hall, London; Usher Hall, Edinburgh; Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool; Town Hall, Watford; Royal Festival Hall, London; Colston Hall, Bristol; Free Trade Hall, Manchester; Fairfield Hall, Croydon; Wessex Hall, Poole; Barbican Concert Hall, London; St. David's Hall, Cardiff; Royal Concert Hall, Nottingham; acoustical design of concert halls in subjective and objective terms; solution of the large concert hall problem. Part 5 Chamber music and recital halls: reverberation time and loudness; room form for chamber music; Wigmore Hall, London; Queen Elizabeth Hall, London; The Maltings Concert Hall, Snape, Suffolk; Faculty of Music Auditorium, Cambridge; conclusions. Part 16 Acoustics for speech: the nature of speech; speech in the open air; speech in rooms; is there an optimum profile for theatre design?; design for speech in theatres; the early reflection ratio; acoustic measurement of theatres. Part 7 Theatre acoustics: classical Greek and Roman theatre; Elizabethan theatre in London; the development of the proscenium theatre; the acoustics of six proscenium theatres; the open stage; theatre in the round. Part 8 Acoustics for opera: the elements of opera house design: stage and pit design; opera house form and acoustics; British opera houses; objective behaviour in opera houses. Part 9 Acoustics for multi-purpose use: variable acoustic elements; the totally variable acoustic space; meeting the requirements of both speech and music; variable acoustics through electronics; the "Proscenium Concert Hall". Part 10 Multi-purpose halls in Britain: Wembley Conference Centre; Central Hall, University of York; Arts Centre Hall, University of Warwick; Assembly Rooms, Derby; The Hexagon, Reading; Eden Court Theatre, Inverness; Theatre Royal, Plymouth; Derngate Centre, Northampton. Part 11 The art and science of acoustics.