In legendary Music Hall, acoustics matter

This story was originally published March 11, 2016.

Music Hall is the only 19th-century concert hall in America that is currently the home of a major orchestra, the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. Designed in 1878 by Samuel Hannaford, it’s a fine old building with wooden and plaster interiors, two balconies and a high, coffered ceiling. It is legendary for its world-class acoustics.

The character of an orchestra is shaped by its concert hall – or its acoustical space. A good hall will have a rich but clear sound for listeners, and it will also have a certain amount of resonance. Those qualities have made Music Hall ideal for recording the chart-topping albums by the CSO and Cincinnati Pops for more than four decades. And they have helped to give the orchestra the longest standing subscriber base in the nation.

The Enquirer recently met with acoustical consultant Paul Scarbrough of Akustiks to discuss the changes that are being made to Springer Auditorium as part of the planned, $135 million renovation of Music Hall this year. His challenge, he said, is to “build upon the signature warmth and resonance of the sound” while also making improvements.

He starts with what he calls “musical memory.”

Need a break? Play the USA TODAY Daily Crossword Puzzle.

“People have a very strong memory for how the CSO, Pops, May Festival Chorus or Cincinnati Opera sound in Music Hall today,” he said. “So we want to keep that musical memory in the forefront of our minds, so we’re building on that memory, not replacing it with something different.”

Another goal is to increase the sense of connection between the audience and the performer. The orchestra will play on risers on a stage extension, and walls will be constructed inside current walls.

“To address the connection between audience and performer, and to increase the impact in the room, we wanted to narrow the room, acoustically speaking, so that the reflections from the side walls arrived to the listeners, particularly to those seated in the center of the orchestra floor, more quickly and with greater strength,” he said. “We also wanted to remove some cubic volume, which is currently about 1 million cubic feet. The impact a performer can have is reduced by that large cubic volume.”

Finally, the goal is to improve onstage hearing for the players, both across the stage, and up and downstage.

Scarbrough answered more questions about the project:

Question: Your experience includes working on some prominent concert halls, including the renovation of Cleveland’s Severance Hall. How does Music Hall compare in complexity?

Answer: I guess I would put this pretty high on the complexity scale. Because first you have the fact that the hall already has a very good acoustic. So the big concern is that we retain that and build on it and not in any way denigrate it.

Secondly, as an historic renovation of a building of this era, the whole issue of threading modern, contemporary systems into the building, and doing it in a way that respects the historic fabric of the building, adds another layer of complexity to it.

The final layer of complexity is that this is not only a concert hall for the CSO. This is also an opera house for Cincinnati Opera, a hall for Cincinnati Ballet, it’s a home for the Cincinnati Pops as well as the May Festival Chorus. So it’s a multipurpose hall, and multipurpose halls have challenges that are unique to them.

Q: If you want to retain the “musical memory” of the hall, why change the hall?

A: Well, we’re layering some new qualities on top of some existing qualities. The most striking thing about the acoustics in Music Hall is the warm and enveloping resonance of the space. That’s the thing that immediately grabs the listener. We’re going to be preserving that quality of the sound. And the things we’re layering on top of that, are the icing on the cake. People will still hear that warm, embracing resonance of the space, but they’ll say, “The orchestra feels closer to me now.”

Q: What kinds of tests did you perform in Music Hall?

A: We did some objective measurements to characterize the acoustics of a space. But we really did a lot more emphasis on listening, which we did with the orchestra in both performances and rehearsals, as well as opera rehearsals and performances, and with the Pops and the May Festival.

Q: Have you built a mock-up model of the hall, or did you only use a computer model?

A: We’ve studied the hall using computer models. Because for this project, you have the full-scale model (the actual hall) that you can work with. But the computer model helped us hone in on certain dimensions related to the narrowing of the room and the (sound) production of the under-balcony areas.

Q: New, slightly curved walls will be constructed inside the current concert hall, going in 6 feet on either side and 20 feet at the back. But the upper level will not change. Explain that.

A: The resonance, or the reverberation, really lives at the upper part of the room. ... The room is naturally more resonant as you get higher up. That’s why some people will gravitate to the gallery and say those are the best seats in the house, because they like a more reverberant character.

Q: What material will the new walls be made of?

A: It’s called cement board. It’s like drywall, but it’s made with cement rather than gypsum plaster as the binding agent. And it’s going to be built up in a large number of layers, to about 4 inches of thickness. We’re still fine-tuning that to get the right mix of material. But the idea is that we’re replicating the stiffness and the mass of the original walls of the hall, which are plaster directly on brick.

(In addition, project architects said that the auditorium’s wooden floor will be removed, and the orchestra floor is being reconstructed with concrete, partly because there will be a new heating and cooling system under the seating area. The floor’s surface will be covered with wood, with carpeted aisles.)

Q: What about the seat cushions?

A: We’ve worked closely with the theater consultants to specify the new theater chairs. The back is solid wood, the underside of the seat is also wood. For the cushion, we’ve given them criteria for the thickness of the padding, and asked for it to be as thin as possible without compromising comfort.

Q: Will there be other materials to absorb sound, such as adjustable curtains in the hall?

A: In the gallery level, there will be some holes or sleeves in the ceiling that will allow one to draw up some drapery along those wall surfaces if they want to.

Q: Originally the orchestra “lift” (stage extension) was quite far into the hall, but you have revised that. How far out will it be?

A: It’s going to move the orchestra out about another 9 feet into the room. The total depth is about 12 feet. We trimmed it as a part of our discovery process. ... We had concerns about bringing the orchestra that far out because it meant that sightline issues on the balcony, gallery and even on the orchestra floor became more difficult to deal with.

Obviously, the farther out you push the performer, the steeper the rake of the seating has to get on each balcony and even on the orchestra floor, to allow people to be able to see to the edge of the extended stage.

Q: How sure can you be that 18 or 19 months from now, when the resident companies move back in, that it will be the acoustical space you had planned and hoped for?

A: I’m very very confident that the moves we’re making will result in a positive response from the musicians onstage, and the audience in the house. The kinds of moves we’re making have all been tested and developed in other spaces, both new and renovated spaces. So we’re not trying to do a lot of new ideas here. We’re taking from historical precedence – from Symphony Hall in Boston and Carnegie Hall in New York and the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam – and applying the lessons we’ve learned to this space.