A music rehearsal room renovation can be acoustically challenging in that there is often limited room volume, lack of loudness control, and budget constraints. Two case studies detail these challenges. (1) The University of North Texas’ choral rehearsal room was due for renovation and with a volume of only 44,000 cubic feet, the room had to accommodate choral ensembles varying from 20–85 people for daily use, over 100 voices for an annual festival, and an added recital use. At an appropriate budget, the renovation used room shaping to simultaneously break up parallel surfaces and support voices while also adding adjustable acoustics to allow for tuning of the room for each rehearsal or performance. (2) The University of Texas at San Antonio’s large band, orchestra, and jazz rehearsal room lacked loudness control even with an approximate volume of 73,500 cubic feet to serve 30 – 70 + musicians. At a much more limited budget, the solution was to flip the orientation of the musician layout in the room to take advantage of the existing room geometry and to introduce variable absorption stored exposed to the room which increased the overall absorption while also giving the ensembles an opportunity to tune the room.
Since 1940 Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in Lenox, Massachusetts, has operated the Tanglewood Music Center (TMC), a summer music academy where students can study with world class musicians. In 2019 Tanglewood added a new program, the Tanglewood Learning Institute (TLI), offering music lovers access to rehearsals, lectures, master classes and recitals. TLI will use a new facility, the Linde Center for Music and Learning, designed by Kirkegaard Associates and William Rawn Associates to complement the nearby 1100-seat Ozawa Concert Hall, designed in the 1990s by the same firms. The Linde Center includes three flat-floor rehearsal rooms, sized at 800 sf, 1,600 sf, and 4000 sf, offering rehearsal space to TMC students during the week, and rehearsal, recital, lecture, and banqueting space for TLI patrons on weekends. The Linde Center is air conditioned, but in keeping with the Tanglewood ethos operable walls and windows allow each of the three rooms to operate with natural ventilation, a challenge for room acoustics and sound isolation. The three spaces share a common architectural language and acoustical approach, but the details of their acoustic designs, AV systems and adjustable absorption respond to the size of the room and the differences in how often they see a particular use.
A rehearsal room for a large music ensemble must strike a balance between acoustic support and loudness control. Typically Kirkegaard approaches this by capturing a large volume and treating it with a mix of reflective and absorptive surfaces, plus some movable absorption. The size of the room’s volume, the treatment of the reflective and absorptive surfaces, and the location and extent of the adjustable absorption responds to the types of ensembles and music that the room serves. Three examples: At University of Virginia’s Hunter Smith Band Building, the main user was the 250-person marching band. This new construction used generous height and deep absorption to control loudness, despite extensive glazing. At University of Southern California’s Schoenfeld Symphonic Hall, a former soundstage was adapted into the primary rehearsal room for the Thornton School’s orchestra, wind ensemble, and percussion ensembles, with secondary use as a recording space. The renovation had to compensate for limited acoustic volume and directly adjacent mechanical room while transforming the room architecturally. At Oregon Bach Festival’s purpose-built Berwick Hall the focus was on early music—rehearsal, instruction, and performance. Our response was a moderate volume with little fixed absorption, creating an unusually reverberant rehearsal room with an extraordinarily beautiful sound.
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