Performance Reports: Holiday Edition

Acentech’s culture of innovation includes sharing ‘all things sound-related’ to our entire office. Topics range from acoustical precedents, room impulse response datasets, noise and vibration report data, and the latest technology innovations relevant to our work.

To keep things fun, we also share what we endearingly call ‘Performance Reports.’ Attendees of plays, concerts and other entertainment like to share their thoughts on recital hall acoustics, audiovisual equipment, and recommendations (or not) to live performances.

Here are a few we’d like to share. Happy Holidays from all of us ‘sound nerds’ at Acentech!

Moana 2 in the Digital Age | by Andy Carballeira

We recently took our kids (ages 2 and 6) to see a movie in a real commercial theatre. It was their first time in such a space, and the program was a follow-up documentary about a brave explorer named Moana. Socio-psycho-acoustical observations follow; spoilers will not be found.

Not long ago, operating a movie theatre required a technical person called the “projectionist”: a human who checked the audio and video from a reference, loaded a physical media into a player, ensured that everything was operating properly, etc. From experience, they develop a mental model of what it looks and sounds like when things are setup correctly. Audio and video defects, particularly common ones, were immediately obvious to them. Parts of this mental model may be non-computational, dominated by qualia and beyond the scope of information.

Today the setup and playback process is generally digitized and automated, and the projectionist seems to be going the way of the lamplighter. “Art film” houses serve as an important exception. While the automated method probably works “OK” most of the time, the lack of a skilled human projectionist was sorely felt during our recent experience.

An audio defect was glaringly obvious from the start: the decoder was incorrectly set, assigning the Left and Right channels to the Left and Center speakers. The Center channel (where all the speech is), was assigned to the Right speaker. [For added interest, the decoder also assigned the perhaps half of the Sub channels to the Surround speakers; and vica versa.] Speech audio was always coming from about 2:00 (right front), with music and effects from 10:00 to 12:00. It is not in jest when I say that my kids know much more about audio system setup than the Certified Jabronies that operated this theatre.

The effect was that speech was not heard from the same place as it was seen, creating a cross-sensory conflict. For me this manifested as physiological anxiety. [I also detected a strong case of smartypantsitis, which produces a false elation in the sufferer and a dreadful boredom in those nearby.] To attend to my crushing first world problems, I experimented with trying to localize speech while looking at the screen, and while closing my eyes. Lemonade from lemons, as it were.

With eyes closed, I heard speech from the physical location of the audio. When I opened my eyes, I heard speech from the location being demonstrated on the screen. The rate of localization decision updating seemed rather slow, on the order of a second, with my perception of the speech location “drifting” from right to center. While this is a well-known and studied phenomenon, I found the whole meta-cognitive experience amazing and humbling. We so often believe that our experience is of “sensing” the world…this experience demonstrated the complexity of cognition, and its ability to easily fool us.

Which brings me back, finally, to Moana 2. It was meh.

Berlin Phil at the BSO | by Abbie Snyder

All the grandiose, none of the flight time!

I remember the day my horn teacher sent me home with an assignment: listen to the 1998 Dale Clevenger recording of Schumann’s Konzertstück for 4 horns. After that, I became obsessed with the Berlin Phil and their distinctive horn sound, letting it motivate and influence me as a young player.
When I reached high school and began playing orchestral rep, my obsession only grew. Sarah Willis became my idol, and Stefan Dohr my favorite modern soloist. I went to David Cooper’s first concert with the Chicago Symphony after he moved, and I attended all of the Covid-era Horn Hangouts “live” on Zoom.

Imagine how ecstatic I was to purchase my first tickets to see the Berlin Phil live in Boston. Let’s just say I went in with very high expectations (especially considering that Bruckner 5 was the only thing on the program).

We sat in row MM (rear orchestra) just below the edge of the middle balcony. The piece starts with a barely audible note in the violin, which was surprisingly clear in the sold-out hall. I was actually surprised throughout by the clarity of the strings because, at least in my experience, clarity coincides with the ability to identify individual players. This was my first concert in Boston Symphony Hall (somehow), so I am not sure whether to attribute this to the sold-out, puffy-coat-wearing hall or the renowned players’ synchronicity–probably a bit of both.

Dinner and SIX the Musical | by Jen Levins

I went to see SIX the musical at Emerson Colonial Theater with a friend. It was quite an adventure. The night started out with dinner (which may seem irrelevant at first) at Estella. We didn’t have reservations as we clearly did not think this through, but they said there was bar seating and downstairs was “pretty empty.” We discovered there was no one at all at the bar!

I was fascinated by the acoustics down there. The lower level has exposed stone walls, not painted or sealed. And exposed wood deck. I couldn’t see any acoustic treatment, but I didn’t get a chance to look too hard. I note this because this was probably the best sounding bar I have sat at! It was kind of tucked behind the stairs, so there was a bit of separation from the main dining area. The background noise level never got too high even as the dining room filled up. There was great speech intelligibility, and it was easy to chat with my friend and the bartender. The food was great. And with a false sense of security, we decided we had “plenty of time” to order dessert.

I got the churro waffles and an espresso martini. My friend got the bread pudding and a lychee martini or . . . something with lychee. And we suddenly realized that we did not, in fact, have plenty of time. We scarfed down what we could. But sadly, I abandoned half of my espresso martini. While we could theoretically walk to the theater, I thought it would be “faster” to take an Uber.

And that is how I learned that I live in the suburbs.

Even just going a few blocks in the city on a Friday night was very, very slow. It all seems predictable now. The Uber app was predicting that we would get there after 8:00! Egads! We weren’t sure if they would let us in. I think a turtle could have gotten there faster than the car was going. We got out of the car at the corner, rushed across the street, and found a side entrance, and made it to our seats at the exact moment the first song started. We were also not the only stragglers. Whew.

The costumes were VERY sparkly. I didn’t know much about the show aside from it being about the six wives of Henry the 8th. It felt more like a concert than a musical as there was very little talking and it was almost entirely music. The performers were all excellent singers and dancers. And they had a live band on stage. I have to say that everything sounded clear and well-balanced. We were under the balcony, but I couldn’t really tell. My last time in the theater, I was on the balcony, but that was for a comedy show, so it is hard to compare. I did note some under balcony delay fill speakers. Despite having been to this theater twice now, I don’t have a good sense of the acoustic treatments, at least in terms of absorption. There are some decorative elements that provide some level of diffusion.

I was especially impressed with the cast member who played the third wife. Her vocal placement and breath support was outstanding. One of the performers later in the show seemed to lose some vocal support for a moment, but it came back. I’m not sure a non-singer would have noticed. My friend who knows the show much better says there were a few times when the singers didn’t hit the right notes. But nothing sounded off-key at least! I couldn’t tell to be honest.

It was a fun night and a fun show!