Christopher Blair – full time acoustician, part-time conductor, 4th time blogger.
Before anyone gets excited, I am talking about acoustical models here (sigh), but even these can produce dangerous results.
Guest Posts
Orchestral Acoustics 101: Avery Fisher Hall
What went wrong, and how to fix it Christopher Blair – full time acoustician, part-time conductor, 3rd time blogger. “For me the evening can’t end soon enough. I head back to my hotel with a splitting headache triggered by the blare of the orchestra and that spot in the Mahler where a percussionist strikes a rail with a sledgehammer….There’s enough blame to go around, of course, but by now I’ve become …
Orchestral Acoustics 101: Vineyard vs. Shoebox
Are visual intimacy and sonic-envelopment mutually exclusive? Christopher Blair – full time acoustician, part-time conductor, 2nd time blogger. Following up on our previous discussion of acoustic conditions for orchestral players, comes a discussion of the two most popular ways of arraying the audience for concerts, along with the acoustical and visual advantages and disadvantages typically encountered in each. The question for today’s exploration is how many of these positive and negative …
Orchestral Acoustics 101: Hearing Troubles?
Christopher Blair – full time acoustician, part-time conductor, 1st time blogger. First of all, I need to thank Drew for this temporary opportunity to use his blog while he’s away on vacation this week. If I had to come up with something to share every day as he does, I fear that I would not get much else done.
The additional good news, Dear Reader, is that I am not carrying this stand-in responsibility alone. For those that find discussions of how we hear music somewhat arcane: wait a day…and you will learn something completely different from someone completely different. So…for the acoustically curious…we begin…
Sometimes, The Best Parallel Is Perpendicular
A few months ago I had an intriguing email exchange with Erik Hanberg, former Managing Director of the Grand Cinema, a non-profit art-house movie theater in downtown Tacoma, WA. We were discussing the similarities and differences between the field of orchestra management and art-house movie theaters and he shared an instance from his time managing the theater when he tried to find as many parallels as he could from neighboring performing arts groups to help him run the theater. As a result of our exchange, Erik put together some intriguing observations in the form of a stand-alone blog post which I’m pleased to share as a guest post…