How many seats in avery fisher hall

Work was done on the stage area to satisfy the players. There was some improvement. But Fisher Hall remains a cold installation, and its deficiencies are highlighted by the acoustic success of the other halls in the Lincoln Center complex.

Cyril Harris was the acoustician, have evoked nothing but praise. The Juilliard Opera Theater, indeed, is one of the great halls of the world, and that has nothing to do with its small size. The Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, roughly the same size, is pretty bad acoustically. A psychoacoustic factor also enters into the Fisher Hall acoustics. Seats toward the rear of the hall are so far removed from the stage that the listener has the feeling he must strain to hear well.

As a matter of fact, the sound in the rear is better than it is up front, but that does not negate the very real psychoacoustic factor. These is in Fisher Hall little of the contact between performer and audience that equivalent halls in the United States can give. The management of Fisher Hall is fully aware of all of the problems, and has not yet conceded defeat. Many listeners attending the rug concerts in June the past two seasons say that they have been struck by the improvement in Fisher Hall sound when the orchestra is moved far forward, hus, Philharmonic officials are going to do a little experimenting in the near future.

Nobody is thinking of tampering with the structural integrity of the hall; that is there to stay. But if a warmer sound can be obtained by moving the orchestra into the audience, as it were, the feeling is that it should be tried. And it will be. Philharmonic officials, perhaps whistling in the dark, question the prevailing current estimate of the hall.

Their position is that while Fisher Hall admittedly is not the equivalent of Symphony Hall in Boston or Carnegie Hall, it is nowhere near as inferior as some purists maintain.

The decade's acoustical improvements have added a dimension in the bass, have removed most of the echoes and they insist have made Fisher Hall a perfectly adequate, even if not particularly glowing, acoustic installation. They may have a point, if audience response is an indication.

A few critics—yes, this one among them—and many professionals may profess to be unhappy with Fisher Hall sound. But audiences, by and large, seem perfectly happy there, and listen to music with every evidence of enjoyment. BBN engineers told Lincoln Center management that the hall would sound different from their initial intent, but they could not predict what the changes would do.

Events: Avery Fisher Hall is used today for many events, both musical and non-musical. Upload your photo of Avery Fisher Hall! Upper West Side. Save me. Been here. Want to go. Show on Map. Here to help tour guides and locals. Meet locals and travel companions. In , working on the room acoustic design for the Nashville Symphony in a physical scale model, I experimented with an addition of a third sidewall shelf. No real change in volume or absorption, just geometry. Some of the difference can be heard at full scale.

The increase in reverberation and envelopment experienced in the hall caused by simply eliminating a reflection, some audience absorption, and creating an effective hard-cap was pronounced. Another problem in the design of Avery Fisher Hall is the limited volume of the stage enclosure surrounding the orchestra platform.

Experiments have been made in recent years with Mostly Mozart concerts of moving the orchestra farther out into the room.

The result creates less masking and better balance of early to late energy for both orchestra and audience. This approach should make even more of an auditory improvement with larger orchestras and is worthy of additional study. There are additional improvements that might be considered, such narrowing the room at the floor level and upgrading the wall diffusion, but I sense eyes glazing over and will stop here.

Orchestral librarians often show up to work with a physical list of things that they expect to get completed that day. There is always….

The last few years have been big for podcasting. Though podcasts have been around for over a decade old, the launch in of…. If you haven't been to Adaptistration Jobs lately, you're missing out on a flood of new listings; in fact, there are ten new listings…. My eyes are not glazing over at all. This is fantastic, thank you. I have always been amazed at how inept high-powered architects can be. The only solution is — as soon as they start getting difficult — fire them immediately and call a good carpenter.

Hall acoustics for classical music requires the use of psychoacoustics. Waves do not actually reach the brain at all but are converted into pulse trains by the inner ear. These pulse trains arrive at the brain through the nervous system and they enter a 30 millisecond delay line where they are examined for patterns. This means that the brain cannot perceive events happening faster than about 33 per second.

Above this frequency, the brain finds only periodic sounds. You can give the brain a richer musical experience by presenting it with more pattern information derived from delayed arrivals of the original sound, but not delayed more than about 30 milliseconds.

Longer than that and the delays become separate events: echoes. The key to hall design is to have many surfaces that will provide delayed sound under 30 ms. This means you must have surfaces that reflect sound that are no more than about 18 feet farther from each listener than the original sound source is.

This is why absolute hall dimensions are so critical. When path lengths exceed this limit the sound becomes distant because the delays are heard as echoes. An understanding of psychoacoustics is certainly important place in the study of architectural acoustics. It was part of the curriculum I taught at MIT. However, one must be careful not to place too much emphasis on one auditory mechanism. A little early energy goes a long way…too much and problems arise see first article in Orchestral Acoustics series.

There are a number of experiments one can try with a problem Hall. The first would be to set up your chamber orchestra toward the back of the stage with no player more than 15 feet from the back wall. This way the back wall is able to contribute early reflections under 30 milliseconds.