Quotes About Acoustics

You go to a musical; you are deafened by them, with everything blown up. I remember musicals when they didn't use microphones.

The great problem of the concert hall is that the shoebox is the ideal shape for acoustics but that no architect worth their names wants to build a shoebox.

I went to see Alison Krauss and Union Station at Disney Hall and I would say it was one of the most astonishing sonic experiences I have had. It's an enormous room that's acoustically perfect. My interpretation of receiving music as a layman is that the way the music kind of settled on me in that room was perfection.

Mine is the apartment that receives all noises, even from the basement below. For one hundred and ten dollars a month, I feel as if I live inside a radio.

In Hamburg, there are three major orchestras, an opera house, and one of the great concert-hall acoustics in Europe at the Laeiszhalle, in a town a fifth the size of London. And that's not unusual. In Germany, there are dozens of towns with two or three orchestras. The connection with music goes very, very deep.

Noise is the number one problem in modern offices. A big part of addressing this issue is making sure unwanted sound from adjacent spaces doesn't intrude or interfere.

I have been using delay and reverberation since the middle 1960s. I use them to make what is almost inaudible to the ear, audible. I do not use them to play loudly but to make the higher harmonics heard.

With electronic music, you are not confined to the acoustics of a concert-hall, and that inspired me to bring my performances outdoors.

You've got to capture as much of the room sound as possible. That's the very essence of it.

Performing arts buildings are complex. The acoustics, the sight lines and all that have to just be perfect. So you begin with just making these things sublime as musical instruments. And if you fail there, you have failed it all.

In the U.K., architects train for five years, and they spend one day on sound.

With an arena, it sounds so big and full sometimes it can obstruct the way we sing because we're hearing so much slapback and things like that.

In my own house my voice don't carry from the kitchen to the toilet.

we can hear music under water or in other fluids if the water (or other fluid) molecules are caused to vibrate. But in the vacuum of space, with no molecules to vibrate, there is no sound. (The next time you're watching Star Trek and hear the roar of the engines in space, you'll have some good Trekkie Trivia to share.)

The notion that the womb is a silent place is pure fantasy. If a person dives under water, he hears very little because sound is muffled by the cushion of air remaining outside the eardrum. A fetus has no air bubble outside its ear, and water conducts sound better than air.

WYATT: What kind of sound waves? DR. BAZELON: Tapes of the cries of baby mice. This sound reaches a level of forty thousand cycles per second. It's the purest thing in nature.

Brass bands are all very well in their place - outdoors and several miles away.

The partitions of the houses were so thin we could hear the women occupants of adjoining rooms changing their minds.