Leo Beranek, the preeminent acoustician of the 20th century, passed away on Oct. 10, 2016 at the age of 102. In June this year, I interviewed Dr. Beranek with my friend Ross Urken, who published a profile of the man and his achievements in the science magazine Nautilus.



The following is a transcript of the conversation Ross and I had with Dr. Beranek over lunch at his retirement home in Westwood, Massachusetts.

Beranek grew up in the small town of Solon, Iowa, where he repaired radios to pay his way through the local college. We asked him about his early experiences listening to and playing music.



What was the experience of listening to music like growing up? How did you listen to music? In a concert hall? On the radio?

Well now, certainly radio. But the radio was new. I was born in 1914, and radio was coming in to the United States in the ‘20s. And my family bought the first radio in 1924, and it was headsets. And there was one, only one station that I liked to listen to and it was called [indistinguishable] in Missouri, and they did music, so I did listen to music but it was headphones [laughs] and the headphones of that time were probably not very good quality.

After my mother died we left the farm—I was on a farm 'til then—and went into the town school and the town school had a band. A sort of a marching band, you might say. And the band leader got me interested in learning the drums. And he could teach drums—he knew how to do it. And so I got a marching drum, which is one about so big around [gestures] and bounces on your knee, and I got to be pretty good with the marching drum. And then my father decided that since I was doing drums I should have a trap drum set for a dance band. So there was a fellow in the town there who was getting old and was not going to play the trap drums any more, so my father bought them from him for me. So then I practiced the trap drums in the basement of the high school—they let me have a room down there [laughs]. And then my father moved from this little town to a larger town and then I got involved with a local dance band—five local people.

And when I went to college, they had a symphony orchestra and I played in the symphony orchestra. And by then I was learning the timpani. And I went by train to Chicago occasionally and took a lesson from the timpani player in the Chicago Symphony. So I had some formal training. At least good enough that I could do fairly well. And when I came to Harvard in graduate school I played one year in the Harvard Radcliffe orchestra and I played timpani. Then I got too busy and stopped everything.

What kind of auditoriums did you play in?

Well in college they had a good performing center. No problems. And at Harvard they had the Saunders Theatre, which is a good theater. But then my first experience other than radio with a great orchestra was the Chicago Symphony. And you won’t believe this, but every year they came out to our little college in Mount Vernon, Iowa called Cornell of Iowa and they came to the Spring Festival and played for three days. And the conductor of the Chicago Symphony at that time was called Frederic Stock. And it was of course one of the great symphonies of the United States, it was not a beginner symphony. But why did they come to that little town? Well, the president of the Union Pacific Railway told them that he would give them free transportation on sleeper cars and that since there was no hotel in the city he’d leave the sleeper cars there for three days, and the orchestra slept in the railway sleeper cars! And they came and played. Well now imagine the first time I heard a great orchestra in a good hall was the Chicago Symphony and boy, it sounded good.





In 1935, Beranek had the good fortune of meeting Glenn Browning, a pioneering radio technologist whose car had broken down on the Lincoln Highway in the town of Mount Vernon, Iowa. Beranek told Browning about his radio repair business and Browning encouraged him to apply to Harvard. Beranek did and got in. After obtaining his PhD in physics, he found himself in charge of a wartime defense lab where he helped improved fighter jet communications.

One of the first things we did was to test whether people’s hearing changed as you went up because we were dealing with unpressured airplanes, remember, so as you went up the pressure went down drastically, particularly at 30,000 feet. And now, does your hearing go bad? How much does your voice change?

So we made tests at the Harvard Public School of Health, where they had a chamber where we could pump it down, and it was big enough to put people in, and we could then check their hearing as the pressure went down, and check the strength of their voice. Of course they had to have masks to get the oxygen, but they could take if off and talk for a bit, you see? And we could see what the voice did. And the voice got weaker but the hearing did not change. So that’s the first important thing to know, is that the headsets that you used on the lower levels can be used at the higher levels, and they don’t change with altitude, because your hearing doesn’t change. So we got new headphones very quickly and [the ones for] all the armed services were not ones that changed with altitude. And they also had a nice, flat frequency response.

And the microphones—we experimented with those also and improved them. And the microphones are inside the oxygen masks. And so our big contribution, early in the war, which is up to 1943, started being in all the airplanes, was improving the earphones and improving the microphones. And then the amplifiers—because the voice gets weaker—we put in an amplification that changed with the air pressure going down. It moved the amplification up, so we could keep the level more constant.

So it would detect the pressure level and automatically adjust?



Yeah, it’s easy. A standard aeronometer. It’s not complicated.



You were on the USS Canberra, and you wrote that the main danger with Kamikaze planes was the moment they come in undetected, and then they’re spotted, and the response took too long?

First place, we got radars changed in a hurry. So instead of having you look at the things up here, and they were making plots by hand, they would see a thing come in, they’d draw it and then they’d go, 'Oh, we’ll communicate those bearings to the gunnery.’ Much too slow. So we had them bring the modern thing to horizontal. Put the tube that you’re looking into horizontally, called Plan Position Projector, they called it. And now immediately when they’d see something they were plotting it immediately when they saw it—no time lost—and as soon as they saw there was enough to get a path, then by voice they would communicate to the gunnery and try to get that time down as much as you could.

And so really changing the radar equipment was a big factor. And then making sure that they would communicate what they saw quickly to the gunnery, so we had to train the operators in the radar room in a language they could use to the gunnery that would get the maximum speed of getting the guns on target. So there were language problems we had to change. Well, we had this new equipment going into ships, and then the war was over. [Laughs.]





In 1948, Beranek, Richard Bolt and Robert Newman founded the acoustical consulting firm BBN. At the time, the field of concert hall design was a bit like the Wild West.

When you were beginning your practice were acousticians seen as the authorities on how a concert hall should sound?



We knew nothing.



So who was seen as the authority on designing the shape of the concert hall?



Well, there was actually an acoustician in Illinois named [Floyd] Watson. And Watson, his theory was that you really wanted a dead room with the reverberation being only around the stage. And so he was involved in some strange halls [laughs]. But you see, to give you an idea, my first introduction to concert hall acoustics was 1950. They were going to build this new hall in Tel Aviv called the Mann Auditorium, and so the architect came over the United States and heard that—now, you see, we’d already started Bolt, Beranek and Newman, and he heard that BBN was a leading acoustics consulting firm. And at that time, there were only about 10 of us total, so he came to ask us if we’d be consultants on his concert hall there. And I said to him, 'Well, we don’t really have much experience but nobody does.’ At least, except for this old guy in Illinois. And so he said, 'OK,’ so then I learned what I could. The Kleinhans Hall in Buffalo had been built. We had Boston Symphony Hall, and there was a Chicago hall. And…



And these were the only purpose-built halls for orchestral music at that time?



Except for Carnegie. And then there was Carnegie. I guess that was pretty much it. So I then discovered that people like Symphony Hall the best of the group. But the architect knew—maybe it was [Serge] Koussevitzky, he knew a conductor who liked the hall in Buffalo, Kleinhans Hall. And so he convinced the architect that we should build a hall like Kleinhans Hall. Well now, there was a bunch of sort of misinformation on that hall. The hall there was designed by a Bell Labs engineer, and he—and I did this too in Tel Aviv—used [pioneering acoustician Wallace Clement] Sabine’s data on audience absorption. Now Sabine got his audience absorption by putting students crowded together on benches in a hall in the physics department at Harvard. And these students crowded together absorbed less sound than if you put grown-up people in separate seats. So he go the audience absorption but then instead of publishing it on an area basis, which he also knew, he chose to talk about it in terms of people. But then, if we use those data, and then you spread the people out, you’re going to find that the per-person absorption goes up if you [expose] the sides of them you see, whereas these students sitting together— and they’re kids anyhow—they didn’t absorb as much sound. So in Tel Aviv I also used the Sabine data—there was no other data. And the [Bell Labs engineer] used it and he predicted the reverberation time would be two seconds and it turned out to be 1.4, 1.5, and I was asked to go to Edmonton, Alberta in Canada, and they had asked for 2 seconds and it turned out to be 1.5. And they were also using Sabine data so they had too low a ceiling. You see, if his data would have been correct for the audience absorption that ceiling height would be OK.

There are a lot of dry halls at this time—Royal Festival Hall for example…



Same thing.



So the calculations were right, but it was this one missing piece of data?

Right. So it was Festival Hall, it turned out to be Tel Aviv, there was Edmonton, and there was Kleinhans, and Boston Symphony Hall, remember! Sabine said that the reverberation time there was going to be 2.3 seconds and it turned out to be 1.9. So even it missed, you see!



One thing I’ve never understood about Boston Symphony is why Sabine used the Neues Gewandhaus as the model. The Neue Gewandhaus had a fairly low reverberation time, didn’t it? Around 1.6 seconds?



Well he didn’t know that. He decided to go to 2.3 and fortunately that was his calculation [laughs] because when it came down to 1.9 that’s quite satisfactory, you see.



A happy accident?



A happy accident! [Laughs.]



Where did the 2.3 come from?



I don’t know! It’s what he predicted!







One of BBN’s first projects was an auditorium for a new university under construction in Caracas, Veneuela. The collaboration between architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva and artist Alexander Calder on the design of the space’s acoustical petals is well documented but less has been published about the role BBN played in the design process.

I’d like to ask you about a project you did early in your career—the Aula Magna in Caracas. What was it like working with Villanueva and Calder?



Villanueva was a good architect. But the trouble was that the hall was already designed when we came into it. The exterior was even being poured, you might say. So they came to us and we said, 'Well, this is an awful shape. And maybe we gotta get some panels in there to see if we can counteract this bubble.’ And so Bob Newman and I worked on panels and then Villanueva says, 'Well they can’t look like that, you guys are designing square panels!’ [Laughs.] 'We can’t have that.’ And he says, 'Why don’t we get Alexander Calder interested?’ So he contacted Alexander Calder and asked him if he would take on working with us to change these panels so they’d be interesting. So Bob Newman really worked a lot with Calder, and Calder never wrote with a pen, he always wrote with a brush. [Laughs.] I mean, one little thin tuft, not a broad brush, but a little tufted one you know, and he would write Bob Newman notes with the brush. Well then he and Newman sat down together and worked out these panels. And I was involved in the measurements both before and after and went down with Newman on all the trips, but it was sorta his project. And the hall of course is no Symphony Hall, but it’s usable. [Laughs.]



So the shape and the location of the panels, those came from you initially?



Exactly. From Newman. Now what did you think of it?



Well I heard amplified music in there, so it’s hard to judge. But I like to think of it as a really exemplary collaboration, because very often we work with an architect and we’re calling the shots or they’re calling the shots and it’s difficult to build a rapport and to challenge each other. This was kind of Villanueva’s M.O. for a lot of his work, to bring in artists and experts and the whole campus down there is just stunning, you’re immersed in art and architecture and music.

Well I remember that the panels had just been painted and Villanueva had invited me to come down to the opening of the hall and so he and I came into the hall together and the first time he saw the painted panels, and he puts his hand and he says, 'Fantastico!’ So he liked it! [Laughs.]







In the late 1950s, Beranek worked with architect Eero Saarinen on renovations to the Tanglewood Music Shed, a covered outdoor auditorium that is the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Conductors and critics raved about the improved acoustics and the project’s success helped establish Beranek’s reputation as the go-to concert hall acoustician in America.



Why is Tanglewood—the Shed—so celebrated?



Well, there’s a bunch of seats really in the front, not too much to the sides and not too far back, which sound very good. And all I can tell you is the RCA Victor people—were they the big recording people still back then? I think they were the ones. They came up and they liked it so, sitting in that area, that they said, 'Well we’d like to make recordings here!’ And then I said, 'Well stop and think about it. The hall is open to outdoors and the humidity changes, and the rain comes and it’s cold sometimes and birds come in and chirp and I don’t think you want to make recordings here! [Laughs.] So they didn’t.

It does sound unusual because recording engineers want as much control as possible, but it’s pretty quiet out there, except for the natural sounds.



That’s right. Have you been to Tanglewood?



I went there two years ago.



I see. Where did you sit there?



I sat in two places. I sat inside about halfway back…



More or less in the middle?



Yes. And then I joined my friends out on the lawn. And I have to say that I enjoyed being on the lawn more, but I think it’s partially an issue of expectations. And that there was something so nice about being able to lie on the grass…



Oh yeah.



…with the sunshine and how informal it was and to listen to the music staring at the clouds, and I think the sound was better inside [laughs] but it was good enough that I kind of forgot about the acoustics. I’m not sure that’s the answer you wanted to hear!

Well I haven’t been out there for several years now because at my age it gets harder to go. And my wife also finds that it’s difficult for us as we get older to get out there. And so my last time there I sat in the boxes in front and it was pretty much in the center or off a little bit. It was so good, it sounded beautiful, it even surprised me that that box seat was so very good.



You make it sound like it’s not fully explainable, the good acoustics in Tanglewood, or do you think it’s possible to define it with acoustical parameters?



Well, there are two things I know. One is that there’s not too many [acoustical] clouds. And they are 50 percent open. And so you’re letting the sound get up to the upper space and get a very rich reverberation. So the first thing, you get a richer reverberation. But then these panels bring in the early sound, and it’s true we don’t have lateral reflections but there are some reflections off of those panels to the sides. And that may be just enough to fool you [laughs]. I remember even Eugene Ormandy sitting with me and saying, 'Why does it sound so good?!’ [Laughs.]



Of course there’s other things that are not quite explainable. That orchestra is spread out fairly wide. And therefore you get sort of 'side reflections’ from the orchestra itself.



Because the source width is so great?



Right. And I’m sure that makes a difference. But it also brings problems. If you get off to one side, the violins will sound stronger than the bass. And you get off to the other side, the bass becomes stronger than the violins. And I’ve experienced that. What you get in the middle balances nicely.







While working on Tanglewood, BBN was commissioned to consult on the design of Philharmonic Hall, a concert hall for the New York Philharmonic planned as part of the Lincoln Center campus. The project began with a major survey of existing concert halls, which Beranek assembled into a book, Music, Acoustics & Architecture, now in its 3rd edition and regarded as a sort of bible of concert hall design in the acoustics profession.

Can I ask you about your original survey as part of the Phiharmonic Hall work? Was that funded by the clients of that project?



It was funded by Lincoln Center, yes.



And I assume you were responsible for finding the halls to go listen to?



I did, and in the case of interviewing particular people, they would write a letter to them ahead of time and say that I was studying the acoustics, and would they talk with me? For example, [conductor Herbert] von Karajan. I spent three days with him. But he did it because he was told by Lincoln Center that this was important. And so he became a very good friend of mine. And we spent three days together.



And what was the process like when you went to meet with a conductor? Because I believe you asked each of them to rank order their favorite concert halls?



I did, right. And I would ask them about some halls that they didn’t think about. And said, 'Have you played in this hall?’ 'Yes.’ 'What did you think about it?’ 'Oh it’s not so good.’ Y'know. That sort of thing.



And were they answering from the perspective of the conductor’s podium or the audience? Did that matter to you when you did your survey?



Well, we would ask for their opinion on both. Generally, these conductors tried to go to a concert too and hear the hall. For example, Eugene Ormandy was very careful to say, 'Well I sat here and I sat there and on the stage I had these problems,’ and he discussed the whole thing, you see? And he did not like the Concertgebouw. Even though most conductors said it was one of the great halls of the world!



The Concertgebouw’s a really interesting case though. Compared to Vienna [Musikvereinsaal], where the consistency of the acoustics is very different between the two halls. My guess is that in Vienna, the sound you get at the podium is similar to what you get in the audience, whereas when I was at the Concertgebouw I sat about two—thirds of the way back and then I moved up front and it was dramatically different.



Oh, dramatically different!



It was terrible up front!



Ormandy said that, 'First of all this stage side has a steep ramp to it, and they have audience on both sides of the orchestra,’ and he said that the overhead sound didn’t work very well, and he got no sound on the stage from the sides. It all came from overhead. And he didn’t like the hall. But then other conductors said, 'It’s one of the great halls. We enjoy it.’ Now you must remember that part of the reason that these three halls [Grosser Musikvereinsaal, Concertgebouw and Boston Symphony Hall] get these fine reputations is that you’ve never heard bad music in it. You’ve got great orchestras. And kept feeling there’s something about hearing great music… [Laughs heartily.]



It raises an interesting question for the designer, though, because you could have a great-sounding room—the physics of it—but a room that no good orchestra has ever played in. So did you try to factor in that kind of a bias, you know, how good the orchestras were, how well-known certain halls were, in your survey?



Well of the 58 halls in the paper I published in [Acta Acoustica united with Acoustica Vol 89], and the first 20 halls were the ones that I was able to talk about the most with the conductors and the music critics. And then there was a group of halls that was so bad [laughs] that the bottom group was easy to put there. Then if you look at my study, the middle group, I said that they just seemed to be all about the same, not great, not bad. And that middle group is kind of indeterminate.







Beranek correlated his survey subjects’ preferences to architectural and physical measurements in the concert halls they mentioned to establish ideal parameters for concert hall acoustics, some of which—notably a reverberation time of 2.0 seconds—remain commonly accepted design targets today.

In your survey, you found that the optimum reverberation time for a concert hall was, I think, 2.0 seconds exactly. Going into that survey, did you intuit that that would be the value that came out?



Well, my design plan in Tel Aviv was 2 seconds.



But that was prior to the survey, no?



Yes. And partly that’s because — now let me see… I’m not sure whether I knew Boston Symphony then or not. [Long pause.] But… [long pause.] But somehow my design number was 2 seconds. I can’t remember why. [Laughs.]



There was some debate prior to your survey about how dry or live a room should be. For example, Floyd Watson…



Floyd Watson, he’s the one I was speaking of, the old man…



Where did that idea of a really dry, outdoor sound come from as an ideal, because none of the great halls of Europe are that dry.



I can’t answer that. That was his idea! And one place it showed up was this hall in Washington D.C. that they called the Daughters of the American Revolution or something but it turned out they had an absorbing back and just the live area around the stage. And that hall has always been hated too [laughs].



Have there been any halls you’ve attended that have great acoustics but don’t conform to the parameters that you established in the survey? Have there been any big surprises that are hard to explain?



Well the most successful non-shoebox hall is Berlin. The Philharmonie. Well, [acoustician Lothar] Cremer was very scared of that hall. He thought it was going to be a flop. So he convinced the orchestra that they should engage a second hall, even if they were not going to play in it. And if the objections were too great, they could go to the second hall. And they did that! And furthermore, he tried to scare Scharoun, the architect, into not doing this hall. And So he asked me to come over and meet with him and Scharoun, and I argued that they should make it like Symphony Hall. And Scharoun paid no attention to either of us [laughs].



When you say it’s successful, is that your own opinion or is this going off the mass of critical reviews?



Well, it depends on where you sit. My opinion is that there’s about a quarter of that hall, where you’re in front… Now remember, half the audience is seated around the orchestra, so if you’re in front and don’t go too far back, the sound is quite good. And the statement that [acoustician] Müller makes today is that the aficionados know where to sit and the tourists fill the rest of the hall!



Are there some halls that don’t have good reputations that you really like? Or you think are kind of unsung great halls of the world?



I would say that most of the halls that the architects like, I liked. Oh, let’s look at this dessert menu.



[We look at dessert menu.]



Of course, the best dessert here is apple pie a la mode. And the frozen yogurt is another one where you get less calories, that’s usually pretty good. [To server:] I’ll have the frozen yogurt.







Despite all of the research that went into the design of Philharmonic Hall, it was panned as an acoustical disaster. In 1976 the entire auditorium was demolished and rebuilt with acoustician Cyril Harris brought in to consult. Beranek was not responsible for many of the design decisions that doomed the hall’s acoustics but regardless his reputation as a concert hall designer was severely damaged. Philharmonic Hall’s failure has been pinned squarely on the building committee’s decision to add seats by bowing the side walls of the auditorium, but Beranek reflected on some other possible reasons for the hall’s shortcomings, including some decisions he made.

Of course, my big problem came with Philharmonic Hall in New York, where the ceiling reflection was overdone. As you saw in my autobiography, it was a mess. They didn’t build the hall we designed, because we were trying to design another Boston Symphony there. And in fact, that was in the newspaper with a picture calling it, ‘Final Design.’ The picture was on the front page of the New York Times, and they didn’t build it.



Why didn’t the architects communicate with you?



Well, they communicated with me. But it was, ‘Do it their way, or die.’ What I should have done was quit. If I’d have resigned, that would have been my best answer. I wouldn’t have gotten blackened so.



Does it still frustrate you?



Well, it’s a long time ago. And I decided from the beginning not to let it bother me, just say, ‘It’s there. I can’t change it.’



Are you involved in current plans to overhaul Geffen Hall?



I have not tried to push myself into it. The acoustical man [Paul Scarborough] just communicated with me recently and said he wants to come up and see me. So that will be my contact to it. But again, I’m sure the architects are going to have a lot to say. You see, one problem we had with Philharmonic Hall was the architect was not a good man. He was really a weak person. And he got pushed around by everybody. And let me tell you the thing I don’t think I put in the book: I wanted some irregularities on the walls, and they ended up being absolutely smooth. Now the architect fought with me, and he told them we want the irregularities on the walls. And the building committee says, ‘O.K., You’re through. We’re hiring an interior decorator.’ The hall’s interior was done by an interior decorator, not an acoustician, not an architect.



Were you able to communicate with the interior decorator?



I never met him. I should have resigned, you see, which I didn’t do. We were consultants at the time to the [Metropolitan] Opera House, and I didn’t want to lose that job. So if I quit one, that would make me quit both of them. After the trouble came, then they did sort of disregard me at the Opera House. They paid my fees, they took my report, and they really built pretty much what I had but gave me no credit.



Did you use Sabine’s [faulty] audience absorption data when you were working on Philharmonic Hall?



No, no, no. I had good data for that. So the reverberation times there were always high—no problem with that.



So you were aiming for 2 seconds on Philharmonic Hall?

You see, the big complaint on Philharmonic Hall as it exists today is that the bass is not strong enough. And if you read the reviews, they talked about the bass not being strong enough. And in the case of what’s there now, the architect working with Cyril Harris lined it with wood, and wood absorbs bass. So the bass today is missing because of wood. The bass in my case was a case of not… if we’d put the front of Boston Symphony Hall there, we’d have had bass—but the trouble is the sound could go around back. We had too much openness.



In the orchestra enclosure?



The orchestra enclosure was open, not solid. So the sound could go around back and the bass got absorbed there. The high frequencies went out OK.



So there was a kind of backstage area?



Yeah. I don’t know what that was used for [laughs], that space except they could go in and out through there because they had separate rooms for the orchestra to tune. They didn’t have to go around, just around the stage. But then later, I found that that was where the absorption was coming from. There was some absorption in the pipe organ and that also took some bass out. But the big absorption was around the back. And if I’d known enough and forced the architect, if that was possible [laughs] to put in what’s in Symphony Hall afterwards to correct it, we’d probably have recovered the bass. But then they hired other consultants and I was out of it.



If you were to do it all over again do you think you would go with the same design? Or do you think, after moving on in your career, you would have edited or altered that original design?



Well the only thing I would have changed was not make the hall quite as wide as it is. It’s a wider hall than I would like it. I would like it narrower. Because when you get wider, then these reflections come in later and you don’t get the full effect of them. So it would be better to have the hall a little narrower. But then that’s going to restrict the audience size and that’s what got us in trouble to start with! We wanted to keep the audience down to 2400 and I even wrote a paper that went into the Lincoln Center’s own publication arguing how strong I felt about 2400 seats. Well then the building committee came in and says, 'It’s going to be 2700.’ And that’s when the big changes came. They had to pack in 2700 and that meant the balconies started to be horizontal, had to come up like this, so you get bigger area in the balconies, you get more people in. And everything changed then.





After the disastrous experience of Philharmonic Hall, Beranek turned his attention away from concert hall acoustics and towards other projects at BBN, which had expanded from its initial acoustic consulting practice into other areas of technology and communications. Among these prjoects was ARPANET, the immediate forerunner of the Internet.

ARPANET [laughs] is so different. You see, let’s get the reason why the ARPANET was financed. The ARPA was a part of the Department of Defense, where they put money to do unusual things. They really told them, 'You can spend big money doing some unusual things.’ So at that time, we were prominent in the beginnings of time sharing, where multiple people could use one computer without these people knowing that each other was using it. It’s called time sharing. And our company was right up front in that. And if fact, the first public demonstration of time share—our company made it. So we were very much in this.

Well then ARPA decided that what they’d do is put a big computer in each of the big universities and they would time share them so that all the people in the university could use one big computer and just have terminals out. And that resulted then in these different universities and there were 19 of the universities that put these expensive computers in, and I’m sorry, not all universities. Some of them were government installations. But there were 19 total. And then somebody said, 'Well why don’t we hook these things together?’ And then the smaller universities will not need to get a big computer because they can hook into this communication line with just a keyboard, so to speak. And then they can ask for time on these big ones. And get permission to use Harvard’s computer for maybe an hour after midnight, and MIT’s for an hour. Or UCLA’s for an hour, so that the smaller universities could use the big universities’ computers but if we hook them all together then they can have a choice of 19 big computers. So they then said, 'Well, ok we’ll hook these together — that’s never been done before — so why don’t we finance somebody to figure out how to hook 'em together.'

And they sent out proposals to, I don’t know, 60 companies or so, and 30 responded and told how they would do this, and it turned out that our company and Raytheon had the best ideas on how to hook together these with a network. And finally when they got down to studying it they said that they thought we would do a better job than Raytheon. So we got the job of hooking the 19 computers together. And that was the ARPANET. Then when the ARPANET got so — as it grew, other people wanted to hook in, even England hooked in, and when it got up to about 500 people on it — 500 users — they decided to split it in two and make two networks, and then coupled them together with the TCP/IP protocol, which is not Bolt, Beranek and Newman’s, and that was the Internet. And from then on, it grew like fury. [Laughs.] But the PC came in, remember that was a big push. Everybody got into it then.





During his time away from concert hall acoustics, other acousticians began to challenge some of the measures and targets Beranek had derived in his survey as well as propose new ones.

Did it come as a surprise to you when Harold Marshall and Mike Barron published their articles on lateral reflections? Because it’s something that is missing from your initial survey.

If you read my last paper, the last paragraph talks to this. But you see, the problem with his design is that they are taking too much of the early energy and throwing it back on the audience. So you don’t have much energy going into reverberation. And so the reverberation lacks intensity, it’s quieter. And I don’t like that.



The acoustician Eckhardt Kahle recently tried to quantify the ratio of early to late energy. That was part of the design for the new Philharmonie de Paris. The acoustical consultants for Paris claimed that their design strategy was to reflect a lot of early energy back and then add reverb chambers to boost the reverberation time. But it doesn’t really work because it decouples the early sound and the reverberation, so you get strong direct sound because you’re close to the orchestra, and you get reflections from the side walls and reflectors, and then there’s nothing.

Well it’s partly a matter of energy, you remember? That you take so much energy away from the reverberation. Now, there’s another problem that people are not aware of. And that is that in most of these surround hall — you take Disney [Concert Hall], and you take — well, this new hall in Paris — those two examples. They’re using heavily upholstered seats. So much so that whether the audience is in there or not, the reverberation is the same. Now what does that do? You find that even when the audience is there in heavily upholstered seats, the audience absorbs more sound than if they’re on seats like in Symphony Hall, where the absorption is very little in the chairs. And the difference is then that you’re not getting enough energy into the reverberant sound.



It basically goes to waste because it’s not reaching people’s ears. It’s just the chairs sucking it up.



Chairs sucking it up. So now, if I go to three principal halls where they have these heavily absorbing chairs — one is in Japan [possibly Suntory Hall], one is Disney, and one is Paris, I’ve had now audiences say, 'These halls are pretty good with Mahler — they’ve got full orchestra, loud. But when you get a quiet group in there, they’re too quiet. The hall doesn’t have the strength it should.’ And that’s due to the heavily upholstered seats.



Have you been to Snape Maltings in the United Kingdom?



No.

This is the first project designed by Arup. A concert hall by Derek Sugden. And the seats there are wicker. So they absorb no sound whatsoever. And it’s a nightmare for rehearsing in there…



Oh yeah, it would be.

…but when it’s full to capacity, it sounds marvelous in there, and the entire space is a brick floor, brick walls, heavy timber ceiling, and you really sense that some of the sound energy hitting that floor is not absorbed, that it’s a very enveloping kind of sound. It’s a kind of hard sell to an orchestra to have such a big difference between a rehearsal condition and a performance condition.



Well, of course [acoustician Russell] Johson tried to take that into account in the one over in Switzerland.



KKL Lucerne?



Lucerne. And he had the curtains you could pull out. And that helps overcome that argument. Because you pull the curtains out during rehearsal.







Russell Johnson was an architect who worked with Beranek at BBN on the design of Philharmonic Hall and later founded his own firm, Artec. Johnson was more successful than his mentor at winning concert hall work. He designed some of the most highly-regarded concert halls of the late 20th-century, many of them incorporating his signature reverberation chambers.

How did Russ Johnson start working at BBN? Because he was an architect.



I know, but the head of our architectural acoustics division after it started growing—I was spending more of my time with the ARPANET kind of people, and less time with acoustical people—Newman and Cavanaugh took over. And they ran the architectural acoustics. And they hired him. Now why I don’t know! [Laughs.] Well, Russell was a problem also. Because he was not very good on keeping books or getting his charges in for travel and all the things that you expect an employee to take care of he did not do.

Did you work together much? Or at that point were you kind of working in separate departments.



No, but he worked with me on Philharmonic Hall. By then, he’d been working in architectural acoustics quite a while. So he had ideas. And we worked together fairly well. But nothing we could do to change the changes or prevent the changes that took place.



Did you have slightly different ideas about acoustics or about how rooms should sound?



Of course his idea even when we were working together on Philharmonic Hall even, he said, 'Why don’t we have some chambers on the side that we could open and close?’ And I said, 'This is too expensive, too much trouble, we can’t do it.’ And so I prevented them from coming in to Philharmonic Hall. But then he got them into other halls. [Laughs.] But the chamber idea hasn’t been terribly successful.



It may be a problem of where the energy goes and that the chambers begin to decouple the response of the room, and it’s maybe not quite as even a response. I went to Symphony Hall in Birmingham recently and the audience was very impressed when the reverberation chamber doors moved at intermission. It was very dramatic when they opened and closed. So it adds to the spectacle.



You heard the difference?



I did. But, you know, I think the intention was simply to change the reverberation time without anything else changing, and of course it changes the spatial balance…



Yes, it does.



… and in Birmingham the reverberation chambers are above the stage and make the sound sound more frontal and there’s a bit of image uplift and I don’t know, not all coupled sounds sound alike, I guess. It’s not going to sound like the Concertgebouw, this rich, spatially broad, well—integrated sound, somehow.



Well I never saw the two comparisons. Or heard the two comparisons. I was there when they had it where they liked it. And it was fairly good, the Birmingham Hall.



I think another reason I’m not a huge fan of it is… It’s that it sounds a lot like the Musikvereinsaal in Vienna, and to be honest—and this is off the record—I don’t particularly like the sound in Vienna.



You’re right—Boston is better! And von Karajan and I talked a lot about this. And he liked Boston better.



And what did he have to say about that?



First of all, the Musikvereinsaal gets very loud. It’s very intense noise. Sound, not noise, but sound. And as you go back in there the reflections off the side walls change. It’s not uniform reflections. So it depends on where you sit and what you hear. It’s not uniform.



How does the sound change?



Well [laughs], it changes when the reflections from the side walls change. That’s what you hear.



They become relatively stronger…



… or weaker. And that’s particularly at the higher frequency ranges, you see?





In 1972, Beranek’s book Music, Acoustics and Architecture was translated into Japanese. Japanese acoustician Takayuki Hidaka read it and invited Beranek to collaborate on a number of research and design projects in Japan, which culminated with the design of Tokyo Opera City in the late ‘80s. Tokyo Opera City gave Beranek the chance to salvage his reputation as a concert hall designer three decades after the disastrous opening of Philharmonic Hall.

What did you learn from the experience of designing the opera house and concert hall at Tokyo Opera City?



You’re working with an architect, and in this case the architect wanted to do everything he could with good acoustics but he still wanted his design, so we had to work with him carefully. Now the [Tokyo Opera City] Opera House — he did not want to go to the old circular opera house. But he wanted to have a sound that was uniform through the hall and also that the singers on stage could move around and their voice would [wouldn’t?] go up and down. So in the case of the Opera House, we developed a sort of horn idea, and it’s built into the side walls and into the canopy, it’s sort of a horn thing, that distributes the sound quite uniformly over the hall. It’s the best I’ve ever done. And in testing we had singers walk around the stage and keep singing while they were walking. And the sound did not change in amplitude [while listening] in the audience. So we achieved our goals there. So even though it’s different, it’s successful.



Would you apply that technique if you were to design a hall for symphonic music or is it just for opera?



Well, you must remember that the reverberation time in an opera house is lower than the concert hall. So when that sound is as live as, say, Symphony Hall, it’s a quieter hall. But you want to hear the singers’ voices more clearly and if you go to Symphony Hall with opera singers, their voices are not as clear as they are in a real opera house. Now the concert hall—we tried to copy the principles of the shoebox hall all we could, but the architect wanted a different ceiling. He wanted this pyramid up there. And that created a terrific problem, because now see the stage is here [points] and this back wall comes down [points] and this could create an echo back to the orchestra and to the people in front. It would be unbelievable. And so the big effort that we made with the architect was to get rid of that echo. And we finally went to these shredder kind of diffusers. Sound comes up to them and gets thrown to the sides. And that’s the way we left it finally. So half the ceiling is covered with these shredder diffusers.



I get the sense that Opera City was a bit of a redemption for you. Is that correct?



Well, the New York Times is the one that confirmed this. They ran this big write up on those two halls in Japan, and started from the front page. And on the front page they had the architect’s picture and underneath it it says, 'Acoustics miracle.’ And then inside they even had a box which said that this was my… uh… what’s the word I want?



Comeback?



Comeback, right. And they said there had been so much negative talk about Philharmonic Hall and this was just reversing it. So the New York Times tried. I certainly am happy with what happened in Japan. Very much so. I hate to claim anything because you’re always working with architects who want to do something different. They don’t want to make another shoebox hall. And Yanagisawa wanted this pyramid thing on top, which was completely different. Fortunately, we could handle that. I’m not sure we could handle every architect’s idea! [Laughs.]





Geffen Hall, the current incarnation of Philharmonic Hall, is slated to be gutted for a second time, with English industrial designer and architect Thomas Heatherwick leading the design team and Akustiks providing acoustic consulting.



You say someone from Akustiks is coming to meet you at some point to discuss David Geffen Hall. He obviously wants your knowledge base.



Oh, I dunno. Or else he just wants to talk [laughs].



Would you be game to, say, consult on a project like that?

No, no, not at my age. No more consulting!



What would you tell someone designing it, not so much about the acoustics per se but what advice would you give them for managing the task of working with an architect, of knowing when to threaten to quit, basically? Maybe there are some lessons beyond the acoustics to ensure the success?



Well, of course I would be more definite today in who I’m consulting for and that if the building committee is going to be involved, that I have also got to have communication with the building committee. You see, the architects Harrison and Abramovitz said, 'Absolutely you must never talk to anyone on the building committee!’ So they prevented us from talking to them. But it was the building committee that ended up getting the interior decorator. They were the ones that one should be influencing, but we had no contact with them. So my feeling would be that somehow if you could tie down at the beginning who you’re communicating with and how much power the building committee is going to have over the architect, and if they’re going to have to agree, we’re going to have to talk with all of them. That would probably be my approach.











Image Credits



Aula Magna: http://delacasaalaciudad.blogspot.com/2014_07_25_archive.html



Tanglewood Music Shed Sketch: Reproduced from Music, Acoustics & Architecture, 1st edition.

Postcard of Philharmonic Hall: collection of author



The Philharmonic Hall Listening Panel: Reproduced from Music, Acoustics & Architecture, 1st edition.



Tokyo Opera City Concert Hall: www.operacity.jp

12:15 am • 14 October 2016