From the Edmonton Journal, August 1993, column by David Staples

Every toot on the flute is heard in the hall that Len built

"You can hear every breath in the place," says Dennis Prime, director of the college's music conservatory."It's kind of frightening"

It's also a relief. The sound of airplanes and ambulances often intruded on concerts at the college's old Bucahnan Hall site

A few months after opening night, Prime heard a strange squeaking noise during a performance. During intermission, he went down to the stage to walk around the hardwood floor. He feared it was already starting to squeak though the hall was just new. When Prime saw the floor wasn't squeaking, he realized the sound came from the new shoes of a performer. During the second half, the fellow performed in stocking feet.

The stocking-feet performance has been perhaps the ultimate compliment paid to architect Len Rodrigues, of the firm WSAG. Rodrigues led the team which designed the new Alberta College building and its recital hall.

Rodrigues dearly wanted to succeed in building the hall, not just because of his professional reputation, but because he himself is a musician

A graduate of McGill University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Rodrigues took up the flute after he started his architectural career. He studied the instrument part-time for eight years at Alberta College. He now plays in the Edmonton Cosmopolitan Music Society Concert Band.

The main problem Rodrigues faced in designing the new college was squeezing the six floor main building and the recital hall on to the smallish, downtown lot on MacDonald Drive.

To fit in 254 seats, the recital hall had to be made in a fan shape, rather than a rectangle, which is the best shape for a concert hall. It also had to be dug deep into the ground. About two thirds of the structure is below street level.

Another problem was money. Of the $5.8-million budget, about $1.2 million was spent on the recital hall. "If you went all out in providing absolutely top acoustics, the place would cost many times more," Rodrigues says,"You could spend millions and millions and millions. Acoustics is an inexact science. It is art."

To understand a basic law of acoustics think of sound as a tennis ball. If you smash the ball against a wall made of particle board, the wall will shake and the ball won't bounce back as hard. But if the wall is made of concrete, the ball will rocket back almost as hard as you hit it. Most big concert halls have five or six inches of liquid concrete sprayed on the ceiling. The sound hits the ceiling and flows over the audience. All Rodrigues could afford for his hall was three or four layers of drywall.

But Rodrigues' acoustical engineers carefully designed the plaster and drywall ceiling to direct the sound up at the audience. The hall's walls were made of oak. The ventilation system was made to be completely silent.

In late November, with only the finishing touches left, Prime brought in a singer and a trumpet player. As they played, Prime and Rodrigues walked around the room, listening from various points. No matter where they stood in the room, front or the back, the sound was even.

"The room worked," Rodrigues says, "We were hearing music crystal clear and with great fidelity. It was a lovely space to be in It really enhanced what the musicians were doing."

Unlike larger halls, such as Convocation Hall at the University of Alberta, there is no echo. "You get this beautiful, big sound when you're playing,"Rodrigues says,"but you've got to play right through; you can't sort of stop playing and expect the sound to wash back over you and linger in the air over you."

Many musicians aren't used to playing a hall with little or no echo. Stefan Jungkind, an Edmonton Symphony Orchestra violinist says you don't get much feedback. It feels like you're not filling the hall as much as you'd like to.

But when he sat in the audience, Jungking says the sound was good. He taped a concert on an inexpensive tape recorder and was astonished at the professional quality of the recording.

In December, Rodrigues sneaked into the hall several times to play his flute. Prime told him he should quit skulking and get up on stage to play a Mozart flute piece with an orchestra for the opening night concert.

Rodrigues got up his courage and agreed. For weeks, he practised for at least an hour every night. He was nervous and out-of-tune at the rehearsal, but got through the performance just fine. "It was gruelling. I don't know how the musicians do it. But it was a great thrill to play with an orchestra."

"I give him full marks for spunk on that one, "Jungkind says,"And it sounded respectable."

Better still has been the positive reaction of both the audience and musicians. "This was special," Rodrigues says,"I was a student in this place, I knew a lot of people here, I had friends here, and to be able to say that I've designed a room for them that works and that they use and they really appreciate because they can make wonderful music in, it's nice to know.

Return to the Muttart Hall in the Project List

This is an unusual recital hall as it has a very low ceiling, following the rake of the audience seating at an almost constant height. Because the room has a very small volume for the number of seats, the maximum length of reverberation time in the room was quite limited. The audience and seats are the primary absorptive material, and since the room would be used as often empty as full, it was important to maintain a uniform characteristics for those using it as a rehearsal space prior to a performance. We were also intent on providing a reverberation time spectrum that was uniform and did not add unpleasant coloration to the instrumentation. The midband reverberation time is only 0.7 seconds with or without an audience. An ideal occupied reverb time would have been closer to 1.5 or 1.6 seconds. The building program could not provide the additional room volume because of the small footprint available on the property, and the rooms located above the hall. When the budget permits, this hall is an ideal candidate for a reverberation enhancement system, as the very critical early reflections have been optimized throughout the seating.

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