INDIAN RIVER COUNTY — Last week, when music students from three counties were scheduled to compete at Vero Beach High School, the teachers weren’t so worried about how the kids would play. They were worried about whether the judges could hear.
Pacing the aisles of the much-lauded Performing Arts Center, they realized that last year the judges were in a dead zone – not the best place to decide on the all-important “superior” ratings.
“This year, we’re placing them five or six rows back, up on the mezzanine,” says Crystal Corrigan, the facility’s manager.
State-of-the-art or no, the acoustics of a room can be as key to the enjoyment of a performance as the sight lines.
In Vero, they can be a lot more maddening to nail down, where presenters often make do with an ad-hoc assortment of venues: churches, auditoriums, community centers.
Even the yacht club is home to the Jazz Society.
Take the high school’s PAC, as it is called. The 1,000-seat venue that was state-of-the-art in 2005 today could use some tweaking. Technological advances have made its sound board out of date.
And while the school’s instrumental and choral performances sound wonderful, in plays, parents sometimes can’t hear their kids’ lines.
“For music, yes, the space is fantastic. But for the spoken word, it has issues that definitely need to be addressed,” says Corrigan. “I’ve had people leave. It’s so disheartening, especially when you’ve seen how hard the kids have worked.”
The actors typically wear body mikes, and the school has tried to update them, but the budget is limited. Speakers and the sound board are nearly 10 years old.
“It’s like any other computer. It can malfunction over time.”
Another unknown quantity is bodies in chairs. While sound bounces off hard surfaces, people are soft and absorb sound. The larger the audience, the less clear the sound.
When sound is natural – without microphones, as in opera and orchestral performances — the best acoustics have considerable reverberation to make music sound full and lush. But reverb, that interval before the sound of an echo decays, can make the human voice unclear.
At another school-based performance hall, St. Edward’s Waxlax Center, where the Atlantic Classical Orchestra plays its Vero concert series, the acoustics have more clarity and less reverb.
That always suited Daniel Koh.
The former choral director at St. Ed’s, Koh has a doctoral degree from Yale in musical arts; he’s now teaching in Los Angeles.
A singer himself in choral groups that performed at Community Church, he says he always liked the bright acoustics at Waxlax.
“I’ve been very pleased with the acoustics. There are some venues elsewhere where the acoustics or so are reverberant to the point where it feels you’re listening more to the concert hall than to the voice itself. As a musician, I like to listen to clarity. I like to peel the parts apart.”
Corrigan, who majored in stage management at college, has worked at brand-new theaters and century-old opera houses.
She also worked at Riverside Theatre, prior to its renovation post-hurricanes. That effort largely took care of a major problem area underneath the mezzanine, where sound seemed to drop out.
“The last time I went to see a show there, I noticed a considerable improvement in clarity,” says Corrigan.
Community Church recently underwent a $12 million renovation that in part aimed to accommodate a new $1.6 million pipe organ.
“The organ, more than any other instrument, uses the acoustics of the room as its sounding board,” organ co-designer Mark Lively said three years ago when the organ was first dedicated. “It’s our job to use this sounding board to the best of its ability. That can’t be done in a workshop.”
For choral and organ music, what’s wanted is a long reverberation period — the time it takes for the last of a sound’s thousands of echoes to fade away to silence.
So a Wisconsin acoustic engineering firm replaced most of the carpet with hardwood flooring and, replaced the echo-deadening fiberglass acoustical panels with a hard, dense panel that reflected sound with specially engineered sound-defusing surfaces.
Retractable curtains were installed to adjust for “bodies in the room,” an acoustical factor that in Vero changes dramatically from season to off-season.
The coffered plaster ceiling was coated with a hard surface. In all the reverberation period swelled to 2.0 seconds.
As a result, the organ sounds luscious.
So do the orchestras that perform through the Indian River Symphonic Association. As for the various church and community choral groups, the upcoming Brahms Requiem in April can attest to Community’s accommodating acoustics.
Performed by the newly formed Atlantic Symphonic Chorus and Orchestra, the spring performance last year offered a soul-penetrating blend of voice and instruments.
Then there are the popular music venues like the cabaret benefits held in Riverside Theatre’s small black box theater, and the carpeted Emerson Center. That space is ideal for jazz that generates a sound very different from classical music.
Brett Ringeisen, whose business, The Audiohouse, designs home theaters, says the same audience going to live performances is coming from homes with sophisticated audio systems, and that can be a tough act to follow.
“If I’m playing music that’s already been recorded, a lot of the reverb is already dialed in by the sound engineer electronically,” he says. “They spend a lot of money at recording studios to give you a recording that, for example, sounds like an intimate jazz club, or like Carnegie Hall.”
Organ and choral acoustics are “day and night compared to musicals and popular music acoustics,” says Marcos Daniel Flores, a classical pianist and director of music at Christ-by-the-Sea Methodist Church.
“When you use a lot of amplification like mikes and amplifiers, you want carpet and curtains so the acoustic absorbs the sound,” he says. “With classical music, especially choral and organ, the more natural reverb you can create, the better. That’s why cathedrals have hard surfaces and high ceilings that create a cave-echoing acoustic, which is beautiful. The sound seasons and cooks as it travels.”
At Christ-by-the-Sea, he says they have a bit of both. Ten years ago when he arrived, he restructured the chancel area, removing carpet and installing wood floors that “serve as another sound board to amplify the sound,” he says. “The good thing about our acoustic is that it’s not too echoing, so that the mike will be clear. But it’s not too bright, either. For chamber music and piano recitals, it’s perfect.”
One of the most ambitious renovations – and on a shoestring budget – was done to the church bought by the Vero Beach Theatre Guild in the 1980s.
Mark Wygonik, current guild president, was there when the guild flipped the stage area from the south end to the north and “acoustics were not properly taken into consideration.”
A low proscenium arch compounded the problem they’ve been scratching their heads over ever since.
“It’s been a long road of dead zones, hot zones, things overlapping. It’s frustrating.”
He says he always waits for the “one person who comes out at the end and says the singer was too loud.”
At the same time, he says, there are some areas where “you can hear the music louder than the singers. That’s what’s frustrating: Balance.”
