Fig, 1.

Boston Symphony Hall as it was earlier this century and as it remains today, Note the height of the risers
(long since abandoned) used at the time of the photograph. (Courtesy of Boston Symphony Orchestra.)
j. AudioEng.Soc.,Vol. 36, No.11, 1988November
918
 BOSTON
SYMPHONY
HALL An Acoustician's Tour
by Leo L. Beranek
INTRODUCTION

Wehere in Boston have, over the years, benefited enormouslyfrom the activities
of Leo L. Beranek. He was a foundingpartner of Bolt Beranekand Newman, Inc.,
and served as its chief executive for sixteen years. Eightyears after the start of
B.B.N.,Dr. Beranekbecame a foundingpartnerof BostonBroadcastersIncorporated,
which ultimatelywon the license to operate Boston's Channel5. He served as
chief executive at B.B.I. also for sixteen years, eight years concurrentlywith his
dutiesat B.B.N.
His variousroles with the Boston SymphonyOrchestrahave been as diverseas
acoustical consultant, historian,fund raiser and, most recently, chairmanof the
board. Dr. Beranek was the acoustical consultantbehind the highlysuccessful
1959 modificationsat the TanglewoodMusic Shed, theorchestra'ssummerhome.
Dr. Beranek has been a prolific author.His landmarkbook Acoustics has been
recentlyrevisedand isnowin itssecondpnnting.HisMusicAcousticsandArchitecture
documents most of the best-knownconcert haftsaround the world.
More recentlyhe has become theprincipal co/lectorof thepapersof Dr. Wallace
Sabine, the Harvard professor who developed the first formulasfor reverberation
time and designed the acoustics of Boston'sfamed SymphonyHall.
Whatfo/lows is a transcriptof a tour of SymphonyHall givenby Dr. Beranekfor
the BostonSection of the Audio EngineeringSociety in December of 1987. Weare
indebted to Dr. Beranek as well as CherylSi/viaand Daniel Gustinof the Boston
Symphony for al/owing us the privilege of ho/ding our largest meeting ever at
SymphonyHa//.
Wehardly thought an ordinarymeeting report would sufficefor such a special
event and so we offer this transcriptto the entiresociety.
JOHNF. ALLEN
Chairman
Photographs(unless
notedotherwise)byJohnF.Allen Boston Section

for When the

Hall. Please pardon me if is full, it has a reverberation time in
Welcome I talk a bit to slowly.
Symphony
The optimum
the speech,
midfrequencies hall
of about 1.8 sec-
reverberation time with only a few onds. The reverberation time is a little
in the audience is around 2.7 seconds higher when it's in the Pops config-
at middle frequencies, which is not uration because there are many fewer

d.AudioEng.Soc.,Vol.36,No.11,1988November 919

seats on the floor and the tables have
reflecting tops.
It's always a pleasure to talk about
Symphony Hall. When I first came
east from the Chicago area ! bought
rush tickets to the hall, and sat in the
rear-side second balcony. The rush
seats cost twenty-five cents in those
days.
I especially enjoyed this hall for
two reasons. The first was the world-
class Boston Symphony Orchestra:
the second was that at Harvard, where
I did my graduate work, I was fol-
lowing in the footsteps of Professor
Wallace Clement Sabine. It was Sa-
bine's experiments, and the recom-
mendations that came from them, that
led to the fine acoustics of this hall.
The Boston Symphony Orchestra
was founded by Henry Lee Higginson
in 1881, so this is its 107th season,
From 1881 to 1917 Higginson alone
made up the deficit of the Boston
Symphony Orchestra--a totalofover
$900 000--out of his own pocket.
Then, as now, ticket salesrepresented
only about one half of the income
with the rest coming from charitable
sources,
Because there was no income tax,
Higginson was able to make up the
deficit from the profits of his highly
successful firm. When in 1917 the
firm suffered reverses in its fortunes,
Higginson had to give up. He selected
a board of trustees that, as he said,
consisted of all Harvard men who
would take good care of this orchestra
and hall.
Until 1917, Higginson was the sole
boss of the orchestra. He hired the
first players and their successors, and
he hired the conductors. The BSO
played its first nineteen years of con-
certs in what was formerly known as
the Music Hall, which has been
completely rebuilt and is now the
Orpheum Theater. Today its entrance
is on Washington Street, across from
Filene's, but in its Boston Symphony
days it was on the opposite side, on
a dead-end street called Hamilton
Place, opposite the Park Street
Church.
When BSO tickets were first put
on sale in 1881, and for a few years
thereafter, the demand for them was
so great that the staff set up chairs
in Hamilton Place and auctioned the
920
tickets. Wealthy Bostonians sent their
butlers over to bid on them. The BSO
got more for their tickets at auction
than they would have if they had sold
them through a box office,
In about 1890, the City of Boston
notified Higginson that it intended
to take the Music Hall by eminent
domain and extend Hamilton Place
all the way from Park Street to
Washington Street. Looking for an-
other place for his "band," Higginson
turned his gaze toward the newly
filled-in Back Bay, and negotiated
for this parcel of land. It's amazing
to me that he bought barely enough
land to hold the hall.
The hall and the land together cost
a total of $750 000, almost double
what was expected. The deal was fi-
nanced by $410 000 of equity, with
a mortgage for the balance. Higgin-
son engaged Charles McKim, of
McKim, Mead and White, to design
the new hall, and after about a year
McKim produced a design that looked
like a Greek amphitheater, with a
stage on one end and a roof over it.
Higginson took the architectural
sketches to Europe and visited with
leading conductors and musicians,
and all of them said No, there had
never been anything like this built;
don't take any chances. So he came
back and told the architect to scrap
his drawings,
The city didn't pursue eminent
domain proceedings until about 1897,
so Higginson had some extra time.
When the city decided to go ahead,
he went back to McKim, Mead and
White.
Now let's leave the story there and
jump to Harvard. In 1895 Harvard
built the Fogg Art Museum in the
Harvard Yard, across the street from
Sanders Theatre and the Harvard
Square fire station. That building has
since been torn down, and the present
Fogg Art Museum is in another lo-
cation. The old museum contained
an auditorium that was circular; the
space was actually a true cylinder,
The acoustics were so bad that it was
virtually unusable as a lecture hall.
The college's president, Eliot, went
to the chairman of the physics de-
partment and asked for help. The
chairman, looking for a vulnerable
young assistant professor who
J. Audio Eng. Soc., Vol. 36, No. 11, 1988 November
BOSTON SYMPHONY HALL
couldn't tuba down the request, chose
Sabine, who accepted the challenge
of improving the hall.
Sabine worked on the Fogg Mu-
seum auditorium for three years, from
1895 to 1897. He had no experience
in acoustics, nor in fact did anyone
else. However, he observed that
putting curtains in a room make it
deader by absorbing the sound en-
ergy. That, of course, is a first prin-
ciple. So Sabine and two assistants
carried seat cushions from Sanders
Theater across the street every night,
and brought them back by the time
classes started in the morning. Their
activities became kind of a campus
joke, what with the cushions traveling
in one direction in late afternoon and
the other in early morning.
As the experiments progressed,
Sabine and his crew lugged those
same cushions into other halls around
the university to see what effect they
had on the acoustics. Everywhere
they went, they measured how much
the reverberation time decreased as
the number of seat cushions in-
creased.
How do you measure reverberation
time? It was a very simple task in
those days. Sabine sounded a single
organ pipe, whose pitch was 512 vi-
brations per second, for about ten
seconds. He would stop blowing and
measure how long it took for the
sound to disappear. He learned that
the sound had to decrease in loudness
by about 60 decibels before it became
inaudible. When this hall is full, it
takes about 1.8 seconds for a fairly
loud sound to fade to inaudibility,
that is, to decay about 60 decibels.
By 1898 Sabine had conceived a
formula that relates the reverberation
time in a room to the area of the seat
cushions that are brought into the
hall. The Sabine reverberation for-
mula says that the reverberation time
is directly proportional to the cubic
volume of the hall--the bigger the
volume, the longer the reverberation
time--and inversely proportional to
the number of seat cushions present.
From this formula, if you know the
total volume and the total amount of
absorbing material in the room, you
can calculate the reverberation time.
To conclude the Fogg Art Museum
story, Sabine prescribed that several
I
Fig. 2. Exteriorof SymphonyHall.(Courtesyof BostonSymphonyOrchestra.
hundred square feet of hair felt cov-
ered with muslin cloth (the equivalent
of the Sanders Theatre seat cushions)
be installed on the walls at various
places. The result was good enough
that President Eliot said to Henry Lee
Higginson, "You ought to engage
Wallace Sabine as your acoustical
consultant for the new music hall in
Boston."
Sabine took the commission and
learned at the first meeting that the
architect had decided to copy the
Neues Gewandhaus in Leipzig. The
Gewandhaus was similar to this hall
except that it had a single balcony
and only 1560 seats. McKim's design
was for 2600 seats, and he planned
to squeeze them in by increasing all
dimensions by a factor of 1.3.
Fortunately, Sabine had his for-
mula. By this time he had measured
the sound absorption of seats like
those that are here in this hall, and
also had made measurements on au-
dience absorption in the large lecture
hall in the physics department at
Harvard. Using this information he
made calculations of reverberation
J.AudioEng.Soc.,Vol.36,No.11,1988November
time for the Gewandhaus, and then
for McKim's blown-up version of it.
He found that for McKim's design
the reverberation time would be over
3 seconds. And the fact that the pro-
posed hall was so much wider made
it obvious to him that the sound
wouldn't come out right. With a re-
verberation time of three seconds and
the proposed width, it would have
sounded like a gymnasium; in other
words, terrible,
Sabine simply said to McKim and
Higginson, "We can't build that kind
of hall." That was the first big con-
tribution Sabine made to the field of
acoustics. The second contribution
came when he said, "Our old Music
Hall has the same concept as the Ge-
wandhaus. It's rectangular, it has
many irregularities on its walls and
ceiling, and people like it. Lets sim-
ply copy it, and lengthen it a little
by adding a stage house."
The old Music Hall's front wall
was where this proscenium is; the
balconies extended over the sides of
the stage so that people in the front
balcony seats looked right down on
the musicians. Sabine said, "We can
simply cut a hole in the end wall,
put the proscenium there and add a
stage house behind. This will give
the extra 200 seats needed for a ca-
pacity of 2600. We won't have the
audience overthestage, which Ithink
is a bad idea anyway. I believe I can
design a stage enclosure which will
be fine for the music." He said this
even though he had never designed
a stage enclosure before. Sabine
showed such courage that McKim,
the architect, went along with his
recommendation, and this hall was
built (Fig. 2).
Symphony Hall opened in October
1900. But the old Music Hall was
never torn down, which leads to an
interesting story. The building com-
mittee had intended to call this the
Music Hall. At almost the last minute
they discovered that the city wasn't
going to tear down the old hall, and
they had a big to-do about what to
call the new one. By opening day
they had decided on "The Boston
Symphony Hall." When we take our
tour, look at the balustrades on the
921
 BOSTONSYMPHONYHALL

through the grilles that you see on

the lower side walls. The air simply
falls through the hall, making no
noise.
Not one inch of this hall has been
modified since it was completed. In
fact, the ceiling has only been painted
once in 87 years. Fortunately, dirt
doesn't fall up.
What I'm going to tell you now
about the hall will be a mixture of
what we know today and what Sabine
knew. McKim recognized that if
those at the rear of the main floor
were to see the orchestra, the seats
had to be raked. They are about seven
feet higher at the rear wall than they

are in front (Fig. 4).

Fig. 3. SymphonyHallbalustrademedallionwith the
BostonMusic Hailinitials,
stairs up to the balconies. Cast into
those iron railings are the letters
"BMH," for Boston Music Hall (Fig.
3). And if you look out at the outside
of the building on the Huntington
Avenue end, you'll find a space where
"Music Hall" was to be carved,
"Boston Symphony Hall" was too
long for the space, so it remains
empty today,
They had one other big argument,
They were going to put the names of
composers on all the shields that you
see around the edge of the proscen-
ium, but the committee could only
Fig. 4. Rakedfloorat the rear of the hall is shown hereas it andthe seats
are being removed to make way for the Pops tables,
agree on one composer, Beethoven.
So his name is the only one, located
directly above the podium.
Now, Sabine also played an im-
portant part in designing the venti-
lation system. Nobody had designed
a quiet ventilation system before; in
fact most halls were not ventilated
except by opening windows. By 1897
there were electric motors, and large
fans were just coming into existence,
Sabine recommended that about one
fifth of the ceiling should be perfo-
rated, allowing fresh air to drop
down. The exhaust air goes out
Look around and you will see that
the balconies are roughly parallel to
the floor. Their fronts are perforated,
because Sabine was afraid that if they
were solid they might create echoes
from the rear of the hall (Fig. 5).
From observing the best halls in Eu-
rope, of which the Gewandhaus in
Leipzig was a good example, he rec-
ognized that the interior surfaces
should be irregular. So the architect
designed the niches you see around
the upper walls and, to give them an
obvious purpose, he planned with the
building committee to put statues
above the upper balcony.
A committee of 200 women,
chaired by Mrs. J. W. Eliot, was or-
ganized to raise money for the stat-
ues. The committee decided to make
copies of ancient Greek and Roman
statues, which were cast in the Boston
studio of Pietro Caproni. They were
not ready for the first concert, but
appeared one by one during the first
season (Fig. 6). (When I last
checked, about twenty years ago, the
molds were in a warehouse in Chi-
cago.) The purpose of the statues and
niches is to create diffusion of the
sound in the room, which is also why
the ceiling is coffered. You'll notice
that only a few of those ceiling coffers
are alike; there are half a dozen or
more different sizes and shapes. The
light fixtures you see are original. A
few years back a similar design, said
to be Scandinavian, became quite
popular, but these have been here
since 1900.
The wooden flaps you see on the
upper front walls are to cover the

J. AudioEng.Soc.,Vol.36,No.11,1988November
television lighting. The public tele-
vision program "Evening at Pops"
originates here.
Surprisingly, the Hall did not open
to good reviews. In fact, it was pretty
heavily damned. The reason is that
the people with the most influence
on the hall's reputation were visiting
conductors and soloists from Europe.
In the study that I made of the best-
liked halls around the world, I show
that the median-sized hall in conti-
nental Europe holds only 1400 peo-
ple. I also found that for the halls
outside of continental Europe, which
includes England, the United States,
Canada, South America, Australia,
and Israel, the median size is 3000
seats. This hall holds 2600.
Fig. 5. Perforated balcony front near the stage provides desirable early
The fact was that the visiting artists reflectionsas wellas diffusion.
were used to playing in small halls.
In Boston they were playing for the
first time in a large hall. To them, there areno troublesome echoes here. see that there, too, everything is
the music sounded weaker or thinner There are a few seats in the hall where poured concrete. This was the first
than what they were accustomed to you can get a reflection from one side large fireproof public building in the
hearing. One reason was that the or- of the orchestra bouncing off the op- United States.
chestras of that day had only 90 posite side wall. But surprisingly Now a few words about the stage
players. That was fine for the small enough you forget about the smaller design: The walls are about one-inch-
European halls, but a 90-piece or- echoes after you've been here 15 thick wood. Sabine designed the
chestra here, playing the Romantic minutes, stage enclosure partly to accommo-
pieces that they were thinking of, Notice that there are no rugs in the date the organ; he wanted the bottoms
sounds weaker than the same size hall except in the aisles, and those of the pipes above the player's heads.
orchestra in Europe. are quite thin. There is also no wood McKim designed the side walls of
Two years after the hall opened, in here except around the stage. This the stage for their appearance, but
Boston's highly respected music hall is built of plaster on solid con- the thick wood with its irregular sur-
critic, William Apthorpe of the Bos- crete blocks; up higher, it's the same face gives good sound.
ton Transcript, wrote, "Expert con- except that the blocks are hollow. The great myth of concert halls
detonations of the hall differ, as far When we tour the basement you'll everywhere--and nearly all musi-
as we have been able to discover,
only in degreesof violence." Those Fig. 6. Looking towardtherearofthehall, thestatues
aswellas
are strong words. This hall did not both balconiesare seen.
gain the reputation it has today until I_
the orchestra's size increased to 105
players. With a 120-piece orchestra--
I heard a rehearsal Monday night with
a group that size--this hall sounds
just right. A 120-piece orchestra
makes Symphony Hall equal in
loudness to the smaller halls of Eu-
rope with smaller orchestras.
Even with 2600 seats, Boston
Symphony Hall is considered the
second best in the world. The only
hall that gets a higher rating is the
1600-seat Grosser Musikvereinssaal
in Vienna. Having listened to all
those European halls, I must agree
that Symphony Hall comes in second
only to that hall.
The other important thing is that
J. Audio Eng. Sec., Vol. 36, No. 11, 1988 November

Fig.7. As in Fig. 4, bothfloorsare seen here.The lowermainfloor
is usedduringthe Popsseason.The supportedrakedfloorwith
fixed seatingis usedfor the regularsymphonyconcerts,
clans seem to believe this--is that
the best ones are made entirely of
wood. As a matter of fact, very few
of the best halls are wood. Even the
Kleinhans Music Hall in Buffalo,
which looks like wood, is wallpaper
over plaster. The fact is that if a hall
is made of wood, the bass sound is
weak. It's much better to use hard
materials and to provide plenty of
diffusion. With diffusion one gets a
favorable mixing of the sound and a
good feel from the reverberation,
This stage floor, however, is
wooden. A stage floor should be thick
enough only to hold up the orchestra;
it doesn't need to support a truck. At
the proper thickness the stage vi-
brates, mostly from the energy
transmitted through the pins on the
cellos and the basses, giving a richer
sound.
The only time this hall does not
sound up to standard is with Pops
seating. For Pops concerts all the
main-floor seats are taken down, on
an elevator that's underneath this rug,
into the basement. The raked floor
comes up in sections, and is also
stored in the basement (Fig. 7). Then
tables are brought up and put on the
flat floor. When we're outside you'll
see that the floors in the corridor slope
up to match the floor in the hall as
you see it today. In Pops configura-
tions you have to go down a few steps
924
from the corridor to the main floor.
Of course the Pops is a different kind
of music, and is a lot of fun for other
reasons, so people tend to overlook
the acoustical quality,
The final advantage of Symphony
Hall is that it is surrounded by cot-
ridors and offices so that you hear
almost no street noise,
My plan now is to take you on a
tour of the hall. Because we're such
a large group, I shall take questions
here first,
Q: I always thought the hall had
been influenced in some way by the
Musikvereinssaal in Vienna...
A: Not at all. The written record
shows there were only two halls that
had any influence: Leipzig's Neues
Gewandhaus and the old Music Hall.
This hall is really a copy of the old
Music Hall. If you take photographs
of the two from the stage they look
identical,
Q : l've been coming here for years,
and have always wondered what's
behind those screens [above and be-
hind the orchestra, stage right],
A: The radio and television con-
trols are there. William Pierce an-
nounces for WGBH from there, and
WCRB makes recordings and sends
out live programs. [WCRB general
manager] Dick Kaye, who is here,
can tell you more.
DK: The current radio control
J. AudioEng.Soc.,Vol.36,No.11,1988November
BOSTONSYMPHONYHALL
[room] is the one at the first balcony
level; the window nearest us is where
Bill Pierce is; the window farther
back is the control room. The second
balcony level used to be used for
broadcasting, but right now it's office
and storage space. There were open-
ings even one level higher at one time
but they've been covered over.
Q: Did either the architect or Sa-
bine know that using hallways for an
air buffer was good for isolating
sound from the street, or was there
not much noise from the street when
the hall was built?
A: They knew. The Back Bay had
been filled with dirt over which they
put down cobblestones, and you
didn't have to be around very long
to learn that the wagons that carried
merchandise in those days made a
lot of noise. Sabine's papers show
that he knew this design would keep
the noise down.
Q: What is the ratio of dimensions?
A: There's no magic ratio. But
there are three principles that we can
talk about. First, you don't want too
wide a hall. The narrower a hall is,
the better it will sound. The second
principle offsets the first: If you make
the hall too long and narrow the peo-
pie at the rear can't see well. Third,
you do not want deep balconies. Take
the Wang Center, for example. It was
built as a movie theater, and is not
good enough for a first-class orchestra
concert. The balcony comes out so
far that very many of the seats are
under the balcony where you don't
·gei a feel for the reverberation of the
hall.
Q: How about isolation from
overhead noise? There were no jet
planes in the early part of this cen-
tury, yet the hall doesn't seem to have
much of a problem with them. How
come?
A: Luckily, the airport has tried
to keep the planes from flying directly
over this part of Boston during con-
certs. But no unusual precautions
were taken; they had to build roofs
in the only way they knew in those
days. There's nothing in Sabine's
papers to indicate that any special
care was taken.
Q: You said there have been no
significant changes to the hall. Have
there been any changes to the build-

ing outside of this room?
A: No, except for partitioning. One
minor difference is that the old, two-
story-high heating plant has been re-
placed with a much smaller one, so
the space above the new one now
holds the Pops' kitchen.
Q: [From an engineer who records
in Symphony Hall] There was a story
in the old days when RCA was re-
cording the orchestra that they rolled
off the bass to keep subway noise out
of the recordings. Is there any truth
to that?
A: Well, that's true in Carnegie
Hall; subway noise has always been
very loud there. But have you ever
heard any subway noise in here? Au-
dience member: There are some re-
cordings, including some RCA ones,
that have bus noise .... Beranek:
And some of the buses in the old days
were much noisier than now. There
used to be trolley tracks, and those
were troublesome. I don't think those
were removed until well after re-
cording began here. The original Red
Label RCA recordings have trolley
noise, which I'm sure you've heard,
1 come here all the time, and at least
occasionally the audience is quiet;
I'm not aware of any subway noise,
Q: Is there a difference between
halls designed for opera and for
symphonic music?
A: Yes, there is. In an opera house
the reverberation time is generally
lower. The optimum time usually is
between 1.4 and 1.5 seconds at mid-
frequencies. This hall is 1.8 seconds
with a full audience. In an opera
house you want enough articulation
to understand the words. In Sym-
phony Hall you can, but only if the
singers know the language well
enough,
Q: What about the floor? Isn't it
made of wood?
A: There are two answers to your
question. The floor you're looking
at, which is laid in temporarily be-
cause it rakes up toward the back, is
wooden. But underneath is a flat
wood-finish floor over concrete on
which the tables stand during the Pops
season (Fig. 8).
Q: How does the reverberation
time vary with frequency?
A: It averages about 1.8 seconds
at 500 and 1000 Hz, increasing at
J. Audio Eng. Soc., Vol. 36, No. 11, 1988 November
I'
Fig. 8. Brick-archconstructionbetweensteel beamssupportsthe main
concrete subfloor of the hall.
low frequencies to an average at 125
and 250 Hz of about 2.1 seconds,
Above 3000 Hz the sound absorption
of the air determines the reverber-
ation time. The air absorption, in
turn, depends on the humidity. At
high frequencies, the dryer the air
the greater the absorption, at least
until you get below about 20% rel-
ative humidity, when the curve be-
gins to reverse itself. The damper
the air, the better the sound travels
through it.
Q: What did the early European
conductors say about the sound of
the hall?
A: They said the music was not
loud enough, and was too thin. The
orchestra didn't shake one's innards
like the smaller halls. Remember, the
orchestra then had only about 90
pieces,
Q: Did anyone take into account
the absorption of people sitting in
the seats, or plan for empty seats?
What do they do about wear and tear
on the seats? And is there any plan
to replace them ?
A: In answer to your first question,
no thought was given to how the hall
sounded when it was empty. You
wouldn't want the empty seats to be
less absorptive than they are now.
The volume of this hall is 660 000
cubic feet. The now-nonexistent
Gewandhaus in Leipzig was about
375 000 cubic feet, just over half the
volume of this, so the same orchestra
would be about 3 dB louder there.
There is a maintenance program;
every year a certain number of seats
are taken down to the basement and
redone. These seats will continue to
be repaired, not replaced. Nowadays
you couldn't build a hall with seats
so close or so sparsely cushioned;
nor could you pitch the balconies as
steeply as these. Architects nowadays
want wider seat spacing and more
padding for comfort. If this hall were
rebuilt using modern codes and
practices it would contain only 2200
to 2400 seats.
Q: Couldyou discuss the acoustics
of the stage itself, and why the mu-
sicians tend to like it?
A: It's hard to answer thatquestion
becausethestagesoundisso closely
tied to the hall itself. On this stage
the musicians hear each other well,
partly because it's small--only 1700
square feet. Also the side walls, with
the slant they have and the irregu-
larities on them, give a good diffusion
of the sound. Not much sound comes
off the stage ceiling, because the light
protectors--the pieces of canvas that
hang down--pretty much kill reflec-
tions from there. Because the stage
is not very deep, the sound travels
right out into the hall. The halls with
stage troubles are generally those
925

where the musicians are too com-
fortable, with, say, 3000 square feet
of seating area.
Q: The hall was obviously well de-
signed for classical music. How does
it behave with amplified popular
music?
A: Well, I think several people in
the group here can answer that better
than I. I've heard very few amplified
concerts here. I would think it would
sound all right. Does anyone here
have an answer? Audience Member:
If you have good loudspeakers it
works well. You need large loud-
speakers; but the room doesn't color
the sound. Beranek: There is a set of
loudspeakers over the stage which
can be lowered, but they are used
only for speech. Having no woofer,
they roll off at 6 dB per octave below
400 Hz. The cabinetson the sides of
the proscenium were here before the
speechsystemwas putin, andpeople
who come here without a system use
them. In the old daysa lot of colleges
used to hold commencementshere,
but now they have their own audi-
toriums.
Q: Given the success of this and
other similar halls, why do architects
design circular or fan-shaped halls
thatsoundawful?
A: I've been the victim of some of
that. The architect really wants to
design something original, and a
concert hall is an opportunity to build
a monument for the future. Most ar-
chitects find it abhorrent to copy an
existing design. There are two ira-
portant halls in this country that are -
close copies of Symphony Hall; one
is the concert hall in Washington,
D.C.'s Kennedy Center, which has
2400 seats, and the other is in Salt
Lake City.
Of the original designs, the best
that I know of in this country is the
concert hall built in Baltimore, Mary-
land, about ten years ago. Theodore
Schultz, in Boston, then employed
by Bolt Beranek and Newman, Inc.,
was the acoustical consultant. Cer-
tainly it has turned out very well. In
New York, Carnegie Hall has always
had the best reputation but if you've
been following the New York critics
you know that they've changed Car-
negie to make it look better, and the
acoustics are said not to be as good
926
as formerly. One of the New York
Times critics wrote the other day,
"We've decided that Avery Fisher
Hall is better than Carnegie."
Q: Someone mentioned fan-shaped
halls. How about the Music Shed at
Tanglewood?
A: The Music Shed at Tanglewood
is in a class by itself. The plan of the
hall is an enormous fan. It did not
have a good sound before 1959. !
had an opportunity to work with my
colleagues at Bolt Beranek and
Newman to improve it. The hanging
panels, or clouds, that we put in are
a distinct success. Sometimes when
I sit in Tanglewood in the front part
of the shed, ahead of the cross aisle,
I feel that the sound is better there
than in Symphony Hall. The clouds
have worked out well.
r as of 1949 because they wanted a
I want to talk a little about clouds,
and aboutthereasontherewastrouble
with the ones in the 1962 Philhar-
monic Hall. At Tanglewood, because
of the fan shape, the architect was
able to design clouds that were not
all the same size. They were smaller
over the rear stage and bigger Over
the audience. Also they're not flat,
but are built in four pieces, with
wings that bend up. At Tanglewood,
any sound that comes up gets scat-
tered to the sides and you build the
same effect that you get from reflec-
tions from the sides of narrow hails,
Also the ratio of open space to filled
space, which is around 50%, is about
right. The trouble at Philharmonic
Hall could have been corrected, but
nobody wanted to try. It wasn't that
there were clouds, but that the ones
that were there were not right. They
were all the same size and didn't have
the three-sided shape.
Q: Does technology allow better
designs today or is concert-haU de-
BOSTON
SYMPHONY
HALL
sign still an art?
A: If you want to copy, I think you
can be sure of good results. If you
copy a violin you can build another
violin that sounds good. But I don't
think many architects will copy. Of
those that have deviated from the
norm, the Baltimore hall is the best.
There's good diffusion in it, the
clouds have a good shape, the bal-
conies are not too deep, and the stage
has a good design. Of the successful
new halls, it is the most radically
different from Symphony Hall other
than Tanglewood.
Q: What Canadian halls do you
know?
A: Not many, and the ones I know
are not the best.
Q: Did the new organ change the
hall?
A: This organ is completely new
bigger instrument with electronic
controls. It was done by G. Donald
Harrison of Aeolian Skinner, in
Boston. There are 5130 organ pipes
and 67 stops. The pipes range from
4 inchesto32feetinlength.Noone
has written that it changed the
acoustics of the hall.
Q: Why did they make the ceiling
so high,andhowclosewasthehall
to the original calculations?
A: The ceiling height was set by
the formula for the reverberation
time. As for the calculations, there
are two answers. The absolute num-
ber for reverberation time didn't
come out right, but Sabine's formula
produced the same error for every
hall. He met his goal of matching the
Gewandhaus and the Music Hall, but
he calculated the wrong number for
all three halls. This hall was calcu-
lated to have a reverberation time of
2.05 seconds with audience, and it
turns out to be 1.8 seconds--a sig-
nificant difference.
Q: Would the hall sound better with
carefully designed clouds?
A: Yes, but mostly for the musi-
cians on the stage, who would enjoy
a canopy like that in Tanglewood.
Q: Is the hall air conditioned?
A: Yes, but only in the last ten
years.
Q: This year they' re not using ris-
ers on stage and the sound seems
much better. Could you comment?
J.AudioEng.Soc.,Vol.36,No.11,1988November

I'
Fig. 9. Author describingthe Sabine memorial plaque.
A: Munch didn't use them, and 1950. Koussevitzky, being a Rus-
the minute that Leinsdorf came here sian, said at the dedication of the
the first thing he demanded was ris- plaque to Sabine, "Well, we had in-
ers. It's primarily a visual consid- vented acoustics in Russia before
eration. Some conductors feel better Sabine." The plaque reads, "This was
if the orchestra surrounds them. But the first auditorium in the world to
there are a lot of advantages to the be built in known conformity with
flat floor, because the brass and acoustical laws, and was designed in
percussion balance better with the accordance with Sabine's specifica-
strings, tions and mathematical formulae, the
fruit of long and arduous research,
TOUR Through self-effacing devotion to
science, he nobly served the art of
[In the corridor] This is a painting music. Here stands his monument"
of Henry Lee Higginson and this i_ (Fig. 9).
a plaque dedicated to Wallace Clem- Notice the balustrades with BMH
ent Sabine. It was put up here about medallions in them. This elevator is
Fig. 10. One of the severalsoundproofpracticerooms,
928
BOSTONSYMPHONYHALL
alsorathernew,andwasputinwithin
the last twenty years.
On the Balcony
I think you can see why modern
building regulations would say that
these stairs are less safe than modern
stairs. They are somewhat steep.
Q: The rake at the back of Carnegie
Hall and at the top of Orchestra Hall
in Chicago is much steeper than this.
This doesn't feel at all unsafe to any-
body who has climbed up there.
A: Yes, Orchestra Hall is much
steeper. They'd have to change the
slope if they reseated that hall.
Q: There's a noticeable difference
between the sound down on the fioor
and up here in the balcony.
A: That's partly because we're
underneath this balcony soffit.
Q: It tends to be brighter up here.
When people talk about the sound of
Symphony Hall, which sound are they
talking about?
A: Usually any seat that is not be-
neath a balcony overhang.
Cabot/Cahners 'Room
This is a new hall, put in sometime
around 1950. They needed a room
for special social occasions, and a
place to serve lunch on Fridays and
drinks other days. I'm afraid we're
going to lose it someday, because
they keep talking about putting a floor
across the middle and making two
rooms out of it. I think it's too pretty
for that. The Friday lunches of sand-
wiches and wine here are very pop-
ular. The chamber-music concerts
heldheresoundgoodinthisroom.
Q: Did Sabine do other halls?
A: Sabine did four or five halls,
but not concert halls. They were au-
ditoriums. He worked on the House
of Commons in London and the State
House in Providence, Rhode Island.
Q: Was he still alive when the pub-
lic decided that this was a good hall?
A: Yes, he was.
Tuning Room
This is the main tuning room of
the hall; the musicians come in here
before the concert. They also can be
downstairs, and we'll go by some of
the practice rooms (Fig- 10). I won't
say much about them there, because
we're going to be crowded, but when
d.AudioEng.Soc.,Vol.86,No.11,1988November

we get downstairs you w_ll see small
soundproof cubicles all around,
Another interesting fact: Sabine
never got paid for his consulting ser-
vices for McKim, Mead and White,
(Member of audience: How times
have changed [laughter].)He did not
get promotion to full professorship
at Harvard until long afterward,
partly because of the negative criti-
cism of this hall, He became very
depressed over it, so you see the
Bornin 1914in Solon,Iowa, Leo L. Ber-
anek received a B.A. degree with dis-
tinctionfrom CornellCollege,lowa, ma-
joringin physics and mathematics.He
receivedM.Sc. (1937) and D.Sc. (1940)
degrees from Harvard Universityand
has received honorarydoctorates from
WorcesterPolytechnicinstitute,North-
eastern University, Cornell Cofiege,
Suffolk University,and Emerson Col-
lege.
Beginning as an instructorin corn-
munication physics, Dr. Beranek ali-
rectedthe Elecbo-Acousticand System
ResearchLaboratoriesduringWorldWar
il, for whichhe receivedthe Presidential
Certificateof Merit in 1948. He joined
the MIT facultyas AssociateProfessor
of CommunicationEngineeringin 1947,
a positionhe held until 1958.Afterward
930
troubles we have today are no dif-
ferent from then.
Old Instrument Collection
The 144 European and Oriental
instruments were assembled by Henri
Casadesus. I think Koussevitzky was
responsible because they came here
in 1926, This collection has a few
very valuable instruments in it, es-
pecially a pocket viol that is dated
i612,
Leo L. Beranek
he taughtpart time until 1979.
Dr. Beranekwas cofounder(1948) of
Bolt Beranekand Newrnan,lnc in Cam-
bridge,Massachusetts,and wasits first
presidentand chiefexecutiveofficerfor
16 yearsand board memberuntil1983.
He has writtenfivebooks in the fieldof
acoustics, ofwhich threehavebeen re-
vised recently (1986-1989).
He was also presidentand chief ex-
ecutive officerof Boston Broadcasters
Inc, operatorof Channel5.73/in Boston,
from 1963 until1979,and chairmanuntil
1983. He was a directorand consultant
to WangLaboratoriesfrom1980to 1986.
Since then he has been director of
TechnologyIntegration,Inc. in Billerica,
Massachusetts, and is a consultantin
acoustics and management.
Dr. Beranek'sawards haveincluded
J. Audio Eng. Soc., Vol, 36, No. 11, 1988 November
BOSTON SYMPHONY HALL
Q: Is the collection open to the
public?
A: It's open on Fridays, but I'm not
sure that i't s open every evening,' It's
now9:15, so we had better call it quits.
Thank you for listening to me,
REFERENCES
[1] L. L, Beranek, Music, Acoustics
and Architecture (John Wiley &
Sons, Inc., New York, 1962).
the Gold Medal Award of the AudioEn-
gineering Society and the Biennial
Award, the Wallace Clement Sabine
Award, and the Gold Medal Award of
the Acoustical Society of America. He
received television'shighestaward, the
Abe bT_colnAward of the Television
Commission of the Southern Baptist
Convention, in 1976. In 1983 he was
inducted into the Academy of Distin-
guished Bostonians by the Greater
Boston Chamber of Commerce.
He belongs to many scientific soci-
eties and is currentlya member of Hat-
vard University's senior governing
board, the Board of Overseers,a mere-
ber of the Massachusetts Commission
on Judicial Conduct, and Chairman
Emeritusof the Boston Symphony Or-
chestra.