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The
Hear
and
NowA conversation with acoustics maestro Yasuhisa Toyota
Museo Del Violino Chamber Hall
Location: Cremona, Italy Architect: ArkPaBi Date: 2012 Room volume: 5,300m³ Seating capacity: 460 Reverberation time (mid-frequency, occupied): 1.4 seconds Ceiling + walls: plaster, wood Audience floor: wood Stage floor: Alaskan yellow cedarPhoto: All images unless otherwise noted courtesy Nagata Acoustics.
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The sound of space is one of the most complex engineering problems faced by the architect. People have been building structures for performance for millennia, but it’s only in the last century that we′ve started to understand why some physical spaces sound better than others.
Yasuhisa Toyota is one of the world′s leading acousticians today. As President of the US division of Nagata Acoustics, a company set up in 1971 by Dr. Minoru Nagata, Toyota has worked on some of the most significant performance venues of the past thirty years. He has also seen the technical sophistication of his profession expand exponentially since his first project, Suntory Hall in Tokyo, designed by Yasui Architects, was completed in 1986.
On the surface, the contemporary concert hall appears to be a classic example of architectural showboating. As a prestigious cultural building, a hall is a prime commission, something every architect aspires to creating. Yet the physical shape of a hall is only half the story. For a building to be a success, it must also sound precisely right. Toyota and his company are involved right at the start of the design process: “We have to start collaboration as soon as possible with the architects, especially when they are thinking about their inspiration or design direction”, he explains from his office in Los Angeles. “For architects, the typology is very important – different architects think in different ways. There are many different shapes but they don’t always work acoustically.”
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Suntory Hall
Location: Tokyo, Japan Architect: Yasui Architects Date: 1986 Room volume: 21,000m³ Seating capacity: 2,006 Reverberation time (mid-frequency, occupied): 2.1 seconds Ceiling: gypsum board Frontal wall: wood-surfaced gypsum board on concrete Side wall: wood-surfaced gypsum board, woodchip board Floor: wood board on concrete Reflectors: plexiglass -
Toyota gives a potted history of contemporary acoustic design. It wasn’t until the Boston Symphony Hall of 1900 that an engineering approach to acoustics was first used. Designed by the pioneering Chicago firm of McKim, Mead and White, it was acoustically engineered by Wallace Clement Sabine, a professor of physics at Harvard who defined what we now know as reverberation time, thanks to some ad hoc experimentations in the college′s lecture halls.
Barely a few decades before, major concert halls like the Royal Concertgebouw in Amsterdam (1886) or Vienna′s Musikverein (1870) achieved their acoustical brilliance through luck rather than judgement.
Both followed the traditional “shoebox” model of room design, with a happy combination of visually harmonious and acoustically excellent auditoria. “So far we have two traditional shapes – the ‘shoebox’ and the ‘vineyard’, where the audience is arranged around the stage”, Toyota explains, adding that “the vineyard-style was first used by Hans Scharoun for the Berlin Philharmonie – it was epoch-making, a milestone.”
Scharoun’s hall revolutionised concert hall design, not only in the expressionist, abstract gold-coloured façades, but inside, where a raised stage was surrounded by terraces of seating that seem to cascade around it. Acoustically it is highly rated and provided the model for many subsequent structures. While modern halls are neatly divided between these two forms, the architectural approach demands to be unconstrained. Traditional methods of deciphering the patterns of sound before a building is completed are no longer enough.
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“The computer technology we use has only been developed in the last 20 years” says Toyota. “Before that we used physical scale models”. For the Suntory Hall, for example, divining the acoustics meant building a sizeable and expensive scale model. “If possible, we build a 1:10 model – this isn’t small, for it means that a 20-metre-high auditorium is represented by a two-metre-high model. You can walk into it – it’s huge.” He goes on: “the major benefit of a model is that we can use actual sound, in 1:10 scale waves.
» We used to convert to these higher frequencies by changing the speed of a cassette recorder «
This means the frequency of sound used in the model should be ten times higher than normal. We used to convert to these higher frequencies by changing the speed of a cassette recorder – that was how we did Suntory Hall – now computers have taken over.” Major recent projects by Toyota include Jean Nouvel’s Koncerthuset in Copenhagen and the Helsinki Music Center by LPR Architects. Both still required massive 1:10 scale models to hone and refine the sound of the performance space. “We use them to check the detrimental echoes.
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Walt Disney Concert Hall
Location: Los Angeles, USA Architect: Frank Gehry Date: 2003 Room volume: 30,600m³ Seating capacity: 2,265 Reverberation time (mid-frequency, occupied): 2.0 seconds Ceiling: Douglas fir walls: Douglas fir Floor: oakPhoto courtesy Los Angeles Philharmonic
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Danish Radio Concert Hall
Location: Copenhagen, Denmark Architect: Jean Nouvel Date: 2009 Room volume: 28,000m³ Seating capacity: 1,800 Reverberation time (mid-frequency, variable acoustics, occupied): 1.5-1.9 seconds Ceiling + canopy: microshaped veneer + gypsum board Balcony and walls: microshaped multiplex board, perforated gypsum board Audience floor: wood parquet + gypsum board Stage floor: Port Orford cedarPhoto: Brahl Fotografi
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It’s still the only way to discover these, as computer simulations can’t detect echo problems”, Toyota explains. Elaborate and expressive shapes are nothing if they’re not acoustically suitable. “It’s not easy to change a design once you’ve built a scale model, so we start with a computer model, which is far more flexible,” he continues, explaining how computation plays an essential major role in modern hall design.
Perhaps the best example of how the game has changed is Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, completed in 2003. “What we could study in terms of room shape was very limited before, but now we are looking at developments in architectural design”, says Toyota. “Gehry won the competition in 1988 or 1989 and we were chosen in the selection. Back then, they didn’t have CAD software, and we were still developing our programmes on Workstations, which are very big computers”. After the basement parking garage was built, the project was placed on ice in 1996. “When they started again, it was after Gehry had completed Bilbao and there had been these big developments in computer design”, Toyota says, “so when Disney re-started the design it was totally different to the original. We had to develop our own technology to follow them”. The end result is specialist software linked to high-end CAD packages: “we can now do an acoustic check in a seamless way”.
Toyota believes that the vineyard style “gives architects more flexibility in terms of shape”, whereas in the shoebox, the room size and ceiling heights are far more limited: “a box is a box”. That said, “Nagata has to be accommodating. If the architect chooses the shoebox style, we will follow the design – it depends on the architect, the client and the programme. It’s not a simple process.”
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Helzberg HALL
Location: Kansas City, USA Architect: Safdie Architects Date: 2011 Room volume: 19,000m³ Seating capacity: 1,600 Reverberation Time (mid-frequency, occupied): 2.1 seconds Ceiling: sandblasted plaster Walls: plaster Audience floor:
oak Stage floor: Alaskan yellow cedar -
Yasuhisa Toyota studied at the Kyushu Institiute of Design and is one of the world’s leading acousticians. He has been chief acoustician on over 50 projects worldwide, including the Walt Disney Concert Hall, Suntory Hall in Tokyo, the Bard College Performing Arts Center in New York, and the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts in Kansas City. Current projects include acoustics for Herzog and De Meuron’s Elbphilharmonie concert hall in Hamburg, Germany, due for completion in 2017. He is the company director and US Representative of Nagata Acoustics of Tokyo.
Ultimately, fine acoustics is a subjective art. Measurable statistics like reverberation time only tell half the story. “When I was working on Suntory Hall, I explained how reverberation time worked to the clients. They asked if it was something like an alcohol percentage; did the number guarantee the quality of the whisky? No. But how can you describe the quality if not through a number? It opened another eye for me.” You can’t quantify a concert hall through statistics. “It’s like reading an X-ray”, Toyota continues, “it’s not always clear to us, but a doctor with many years of experience can make an evaluation without numbers”.
Toyota’s involvement with the Disney Hall gives him the perfect excuse to attend performances whenever he can. As a result, it’s one of his favourite works. “I go to concerts at the Walt Disney Concert Hall regularly”, he admits, adding that the “Suntory Hall is also important to me – it was the first big concert hall in our history”. Technology might improve, but the fundamental requirements of unamplified performance will always remain the same. Nagata Acoustics is a job for both golden ears and infinite patience, as the firm continues to translate modern architectural visions into acoustic excellence. I
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