We are glad to be able to revisit one of our favorite posts: Byron Harrison’s Experts Listening. We hope you enjoy your holidays as much as we are ours!

A friend of the TALASKE consulting team finds great amusement in the different noises each of us acousticians makes when walking into a room. Many of us are hand-clappers—some use cupped-hand thuds, some prefer palm-centered cracks, and others choose fingers-only slaps. In addition to this, I sometimes prefer to use my voice—a “mwhaaa” sound that I picked up from another colleague. Suffice it to say, we all listen differently and have our own approaches to evaluating rooms. And somehow, we usually end up reaching a consensus.

Artist’s Ears

I listen for breath. Perhaps it’s because I’m a singer. I want to hear the piano soloist inhale to indicate the upbeat. I love to hear the subtle grunt from the conductor when encouraging a weighty accent. I want to know that the opera star inhales in time with music. I must hear the glottal stop—then sigh—from the actor whose character is annoyed.

This level of detail engages me in art and reminds me that the performance is live—that it is happening in real time and that the people offering the performance are, indeed, alive.

Scientist’s Ears

Let’s face it. We all get bored at concerts sometimes. During a piece I don’t care for or a first-hearing of a complex and difficult work, my mind may wander to what I call the “building blocks game.” This involves ferreting out the building blocks or combination of blocks involved in any given moment.

Any subjective acoustic impression is comprised of a combination of four such blocks: time, level, frequency, and direction.

“Time” includes how synchronously the ensemble plays and how long the notes linger in the room. “Level” describes how loud the loudest passages are, for instance, and how silent the quiet is. “Frequency” accounts for everything related to pitch—do the high notes dominate? Or the low notes? “Direction” relates to where it sounds like the music is coming from.

The fun starts when you combine these.

Frequency + Direction: Do the low pitched notes sound like they envelope me? Do the high-pitched notes clearly come right to me from the stage?

Level + Time: How loud are the notes that linger? Is there a low murmur of reverberance? Or does the reverberance almost get in the way of the music?

Direction + Time: Are the sounds that come from overhead completely in synch with the sound that comes from the stage?

For some of these combinations, we have established and well understood terms. “Warmth” is generally understood to be a combination of frequency and time, when the low frequencies linger longer than the high frequencies.

For others, we can’t rely on single words. How do you describe the sense that the reverberance of the upper woodwinds seems to come exclusively from above me? The descriptors of time, level, frequency, and direction help us put into words the very real and predictable acoustic effects that we observe.

We want to hear what you listen for in a building.  Leave your thoughts in the comment section below.