Tests of sound absorption of seats of the Colon Theatre in Buenos Aires.

Abstract

Having passed 100 years after its inauguration, the Colon Theatre located in Buenos Aires City is one of the most outstanding opera and symphonic music theatre of the world, and being one of the main architectural monuments of the Argentine Republic, it has needed a conservative restoration and a technological update. This has given place to the realization of a series of projects that guarantee its value with the premise to keep its acoustic quality. The methodology employed to select the textile material replacement and objects that have influence in the acoustics of the room consist in subjecting to laboratory tests the original samples together with their replacements in order to objectively characterize them and to verify that they had similar properties of sound absorption. This work presents the laboratory procedure which allowed the selection of textile material of seats replacement from reverberant chamber and Kundt tube tests.