In Tuesday’s (9/6) New York Times, Guy Gugliotta writes, “There is, perhaps, no more uplifting musical experience than hearing the ‘Hallelujah’ chorus from Handel’s ‘Messiah’ performed in a perfect space. Many critics regard Symphony Hall in Boston—70 feet wide, 120 feet long and 65 feet high—as just that space. Some 3,000 miles away, however, a visitor led into the pitch-blackness of Chris Kyriakakis’s audio lab at the University of Southern California to hear a recording of the performance would have no way to know how big the room was. At first it sounded like elegant music played in the parlor on good equipment. Nothing special. But as engineers added combinations of speakers, the room seemed to expand and the music swelled in richness and depth, until finally it was as if the visitor were sitting with the audience in Boston. … Acousticians have been designing concert halls for more than a century, but Dr. Kyriakakis does something different. He shapes the sound of music to conform to the space in which it is played. The goal is what Dr. Kyriakakis calls the ‘ground truth’—to replicate the original in every respect. … The basis of his technique is rooted in the science of psychoacoustics, the study of sound perception by the human auditory system.”
Posted September 8, 2011
