Wall Tilts and Sound Fields

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What happens when your hall’s walls are tilted? Bob collaborated with his Sound Space Design colleague Evan Green on this issue.

Paper presented at the Proceedings of the Institute of Acoustics, 2015.

Relationship Between Wall Tilt and Sound Field Growth and Decay

“It has been shown in analysis and design that tilting the wall inward reduces the duration of reverberation, as it directs sound more quickly in the sound-absorbing audience.”


Two recent concert hall design competitions involved radically tilted walls. While tilting in section, as rotation in plan, can be used to effect lateralisation of the sound form the stage, it has been shown in analysis and design that tilting the walls inward reduces the duration of the reverberation, as it directs sound more quickly into the sound absorbing audience.

In 1980 Kuttruff and Straßen published work including the effect of room shape on decay rates, for very simple room shapes. Essert studied the effect of geometry on auditorium parameters and subjective listening, considering gross variation in plan and section of a performance space, and also used microphones and Soundfield microphones to measure and visualise 3D impulse responses in auditoria. This paper connects the Soundfield work to the parametric modelling.

The work outlined here quantifies the lateralization of sound promoted by wall tilt and the effects on overall decay rate using a computer model to analyse parametric variations in the model.

To read the full article please click the link below.

Relationship Between Wall Tilt and Sound Field Growth and Decay – Essert / Green