Small Room, Big Reverb – Big Room, No Reverb…

At Berlin’s tuned city festival it was possible to visit two acoustically manipulated rooms at TU Berlin: the reverb room (in german “Hallraum”) and the anechoic chamber. The contradiction here is that the smaller room has a very long reverb time of up to 8 sec. due to the surface of the walls and the unsymetrical geometry of the room leading to a diffuse field of reflections. In contrast the anechoic chamber, which is probably 2 or 3 times the size of the reverb room, has no reflections at all. The experience is quite interesting because it turns expectations upside down: big rooms do not necessarily have more reflections than smaller ones and there are loads of possibilities for architecture to “tune” rooms and incorporate spatial acoustic design already in the planing of buildings, which is mostly not highly regarded by architects. The tuned city festival tries to build bridges between sound art dealing with spatial qualities and architecture dominated by visual aspects.