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Acoustics and Audiences at Cobb Energy arts center
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Preparing for its Sept. 29 opening at the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre, the Atlanta Opera recently invited subscribers, former subscribers and donors to a pair of “listening events.” Tickets were by invitation only.
For these opera-highlights shows — the first night included a pianist, a quintet of singers and the chorus; the second had singers and the orchestra — the importance was two-fold.
They were the first live-performance tests of the acoustics in the center’s 2,750-seat John A. Williams Theatre, and they were an assurance to opera audiences that the new suburban theater would outpace and outperform every in-town venue the 27-year-old opera company has ever had.
Acoustics and audience reaction — these are separate factors, but not unrelated.
The audience side of the equation is easiest to measure. Carole Hall’s impressions, and her history with the Atlanta Opera, help tell a wider story. She’d been a long-time opera subscriber at the Fox Theatre, the historic Midtown movie palace that wasn’t suitable for opera.
But soon after the company switched venues to the equally cavernous Boisfeuillet Jones Atlanta Civic Center in 2003 — for a variety of do-or-die reasons — she lost interest and dropped her subscription.
“I didn’t enjoy the Civic Center,” she explains, echoing the general trend of subscribers who abandoned the opera. “And I didn’t need to see another ‘La Boheme’ done there.”
Still, she remains an opera fan, and the invitation to catch the company’s unofficial debut in the new Cobb center proved irresistible — nevermind that last year she moved to North Carolina.
At the end of the listening event — just 90 minutes of music — Hall was on her feet. She cheered the performer. She cheered the handsome Williams theater. And she cheered, no less, the future of the Atlanta Opera.
How’d she like it? “There’s no comparison with the Civic Center or the Fox!” she cried out. “It suddenly seems so professional, it’s like real opera.”
Hall’s friend, Lisa Stewart, who lives just down the road in the affluent Buckhead neighborhood, answered the question with her own: “Are you kidding? Smaller is better for opera. Everything feels like an improvement.”
Hall says she plans to re-subscribe and make performances part of a weekend getaway back to Atlanta.
At this first public encounter with the new Williams theater, says Atlanta Opera general director Dennis Hanthorn, “it accomplished what I most wanted: get people to figure out where to park, which doorway to use, the layout of the theater, where they’d find the bar and the restrooms. Now they’re excited and can tell their friends that things are happening at the [Cobb center].”
MODELING SOUND
No one has ventured to call the new Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre a cutting-edge facility, but its effects are likely to be seismic for the Atlanta Opera and other ensembles that trade in all-natural sound — if the acoustics are good.
Yet the center isn’t designed specifically as an opera house.
James S. Van Duys, the center’s main architect from the Atlanta firm of Smallwood, Reynolds, Stewart, Stewart & Associates, describes the Williams theater as “a multi-purpose facility, a ‘road-house’ theater,” where the primary function is hosting touring Broadway-style shows. These extravaganzas often arrive with the complete package: sets, lights, electronics and portable everything. All they need is an empty stage and plenty of electrical sockets.
And because these shows are typically heavily amplified, the host theater needs to be acoustically “dead” so the high-decible noises from the loudspeakers don’t overpower the room to create sonic mush.
Opera, which thrives on the glories of the unamplified human voice, comes from almost the opposite direction.
For opera, says Hanthorn, “we need acoustics ‘tuned’ to a reverberation of about 1.4 seconds” — the length of time a single note, like a bass drum thwack, hangs in the air. “This strikes the balance of the clarity and articulation of the singers and the warmth and punch of the orchestra.”
Achieving that balance, or at least getting close, is the job of acousticians from Chicago’s Kirkegaard Associates.
The technology of a theater is gradually becoming standardized, says Larry Kirkegaard , whose firm has helped design some of the best contemporary concert halls in America, including Ozawa Hall at the Tanglewood Music Center in Massachusetts. “In a sense, the parameters of what we know in acoustical design is narrowing; we know what to listen for, we’ve carved out what works.”
In the best circumstances, theater and concert hall acoustics are a tricky combination of mathematics, art, engineering, salesmanship and luck. For the center’s Williams theater, acoustics are still more complicated.
They were initially designed by the Kirkegaard firm’s Dawn Schuette , who did a similar service for Emory University’s Schwartz Center and had been a major contributor to designs for the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s wished-for Symphony Center. (In 2006, however, she and two other senior acousticians split with their boss and formed Threshold Acoustics, also based in Chicago.)
Now Kirkegaard associate Anthony Shou is the point man for the Cobb project. In past months, Shou came to Atlanta regularly to monitor progress. The Williams theater, he says, “doesn’t have a lot of bells and whistles and few moving parts, so it’ll be easier to manage and still support the various programs.”
Among the acoustical elements in place:
—- The room is filled with alternately hard, sonically reflective surfaces — like the endangered makore wood veneer along the balcony fronts — and soft, sonically absorptive panels.
—- The “moving parts” include sound-absorbing curtains along the top balcony’s back wall and high on the side walls, near the ceiling.
—- Acoustically transparent metal mesh screens, shaped like diamonds, block the audience’s view of the overhead and stage lights while not interfering with the flow of sound. They cover about 40 percent of the ceiling.
—- With Dobbins Air Force Base nearby, Kirkegaard insisted that the outer walls block all jet sounds. The side walls are thus 20 inches thick and there’s a double roof, one six inches thick, the other nine inches.
—- The foundation is drilled into bedrock, so the rumbles from adjacent I-75 won’t be felt in the theater.
—- Even the A/C vents are designed with acoustics in mind: instead of big turbines blowing air through large pipes, with the accompanying whooshing sound, here all the vents are under the audience seats and have the circular metal look of electric stove burners. As in Emory’s Schwartz Center, the heat and A/C travels silently, wafting into the auditorium at a gentle flow.
One key piece of acoustical equipment isn’t part of the new center. For budgetary reasons, the Cobb center decided not to build an orchestral “shell” — a curved, portable wall positioned behind the performers that helps bounce sounds back out to the audience.
ASO personnel manager Russell Williamson, who attended the first of the opera’s listening events, says that the absence of a shell (and lack of space to store one in the future) means that orchestras will have trouble being heard in the theater — whether it’s the Cobb Symphony Orchestra, the ASO or big-name orchestras on tour. This fact greatly reduces the likelihood that orchestras will have a strong presence in the center’s programming.
Is that a bad thing?
As it is, Atlanta suffers from too many multi-purpose venues, which try to serve many masters and is ideal for none. The Cobb center’s Williams Theatre has to manage to balance just two identities — roadhouse and opera house — to achieve success.
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By Tami
August 17, 2007 11:20 AM | Link to this
I am a Cobb Energy Centre volunteer, who worked the opera/orchestra event on Wednesday, 8/15. I am happy to say that everyone from whom I received feedback after the performance were very enthusiastic and seemed to enjoy themselves immensely. As I wished the departing patrons a pleasant evening, many responded to me that they had already had a terrific evening. That energizes all who work for the Centre - paid or volunteer - and increases our enthusiasm, commitment & passion for this facility, all that it stands for, and all that it can be to the community.
By James L. Paulk
August 21, 2007 11:19 AM | Link to this
I am just now catching up on my AJC reading after returning late last night from Seattle. Including, of course, your article about the Cobb Centre.
Rarely have I experienced so vivid a contrast as I did last week, when I went from the Cobb Centre on Wednesday night to the Seattle Opera House on Friday (for Wagner’s “Flying Dutchman”).
The venues are similar in size. The Seattle house is totally alive and favors the voice. The Cobb Centre is an improvement over the Atlanta Civic Center, but it was still pretty dead, and that was with the improvised shell.
I also had some reservations about some of the design features of the Cobb. It doesn’t seem to know whether it’s a Frank Gehry knock-off (the exterior) or a bit of 70’s kitsch (the chandeliers and some of the other fittings).