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Afternoon at Carnegie Hall

Posted by Brian Cheney (M) on November 11, 2003 at 19:09:02

This past weekend I fulfilled a long-standing ambition to hear an orchestra perform at Carnegie Hall on West 57th St New York City. It was in many ways an extraordinary experience but I will only relate my impressions from an acoustical engineering standpoint.

Carnegie Hall was built in 1890 and nearly fell to the wrecker's ball in the mid 1980's, since it occupies prime real estate and is not very tall. Square footage is at a premium in Manhattan and an 80 story red ceramic tower was slated to occupy the Hall's prime corner location.

Carnegie is quite large by any standard, with over 2800 seats. Frequently the excuse is heard from architects that large halls should be fan-shaped to seat the maximum number of bodies while retaining sightlines. The concrete-and-steel Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco is a prime example of this Bolt-Beranek philosophy. Other recent halls have been shoebox-shaped, their designers trusting the magic of Boston Symphony Hall and the Grosser Saal of the Vienna Musikverein will rub off. I've attended concerts in most of the world's great halls and many lesser ones and must report that the modern shoebox does not sound anything like the classic venues I've just mentioned. Avery Fisher Hall, completely gutted and rebuilt since its 1962 opening, is a ghastly example of what can go wrong.

But Carnegie IMHO is perhaps the premier concert venue on the planet and I think I know why:
1. The auditorium is shaped like a slightly flattened ellipse with very few straight lines anywhere. The stage is extraordinarily tall, deep, and unobstructed, its wood floor with no lip and elevated barely 2 1/2feet above the orchestra seating. Bass, which likes to follow boundary lines, finds its way into the audience with no impediment. Orchestra seating is raked back, as is the balcony; first and second tier, plus the Dress Circle form a stack of ever-larger horseshoes extending almost directly over the stage. The balcony is severely raked towards the ceiling, back rows almost touching it. The hall is constructed on a steel frame but all exposed surfaces are plaster and wood. Seats are plush, but the covering is no more than 3/16" thick. Carnegie relies on its audience for absorption and sounds best full.

I had opportunity to move around quite a bit and have formed a theory about Carnegie's quite characteristic sound, which is best described as "loud and clear". Indeed there are seats which offer Xray insight into the playing with "imaging" and "detail", to borrow audiophile terms, which I have not heard elsewhere. When
seated in the Dress Circle in the front, above row 8 of the orchestra, I heard an amazing warmth, prominent lowbass, and an astounding sense of hearing each individual player, and well as the whole ensemble. However, in this seat I noted that the solo cello in the Haydn C major concerto did not project well, and the midranges were laid back quite like the old "East Coast" style cone dynamic speakers of days gone by.

So I moved down into the Second Tier at the front, seats directly over the lip of the stage and no more than 25 feet from the conductor. The sound lost its warmth and laid-back quality, replaced by vivid presence and projection which made my hair stand on end. Bass was diminished but I enjoyed an illusion of being seated amoung the players themselves.

There was a price to pay for this "presence", however, in the form of a pronounced 2 kHz high Q narrow band glare. I looked around and discovered its cause, and with it the secret of the Carnegie Sound.

(Suspenseful pause)

The secret: I was sitting at the focal point of one of the halls many semiparabolic reflectors which are the corners of the floor and stage, side and back walls, all directing midrange wavelengths directly back into the hall. Of course the flattened torus which forms the basic shape of the auditorium helps randomize all frequencies, but it is these amazing acoustic reflectors that make Carnegie sound so memorably present. To avoid the glare I stuck my head over the railing, neck resting on its curved surface like a head on a chopping block and so avoided the worst of the glare, leaving only that remarkable, vivid contact with the source.

I know people complain about their speakers not sounding the same from different spots in a listening room. Well Carnegie, more than any other generative source, provides greater variety of different sounds if you move even a few feet in any direction.

I'll summarize: if you want a great hall try an elliptical shape, a faceted and indented ceiling, parabolic corners and lots of them, a high proscenium arch with no holes or obstructions, raked rows of seats, lots of wood and plaster, and many bodies filling thse seats.

In other words, damn-near the polar opposite of anything built since the turn of the century.

Big B

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Kimber Kable

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