Conference_programme: 18.9 - Archeo-Acoustics
Lecture: The Significance of Sound Diffraction Effects in Ancient Theatres – Measurements and Simulations with and without Audience
Author(s): Economou Panos, Economou Costas
Summary:
This paper examines the acoustics of ancient Greek-Roman theatres and the significance of sound diffraction effects taking place in the cavea. In a previous paper " The Significance of Sound Diffraction Effects in Simulating Acoustics in Ancient Theatres", it has been demonstrated how significant sound diffraction effects are in enriching the sound field in an ancient theatre by taking into account diffraction effects in an empty cavea. Sound diffraction is a scattering effect which disperses sound in many directions thus it allows listeners to perceive the sound of performers from the many scattering edges in the cavea before escaping to the surroundings. In essence unlike sound reflections, which are very few in open theatres, sound diffraction yields a precious part of the performers sound energy back to the audience thus creating a semi-diffused field. The theatre under study is a private school theatre, in the style of an ancient Greek theatre, where sound measurements were taken in 2011 with an empty cavea. For this paper, sound measurements were repeated there, with and without audience. The latter reveals more realistic conditions during performances. Sound measurements are compared to 3D wave-based geometrical acoustics simulations. The 3D theatre acoustical model was validated against sound measurements and wave interference effects analysis has shown that sound absorption and diffraction effects by an audience, provide indeed better speech acoustics.
Corresponding author
Name: Mr Panos Economou
e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Country: Cyprus
