Leo Leroy Beranek

"This illustrated guide to one hundred of the world's important concert halls and opera houses examines their architecture and engineering and discusses their acoustical quality as judged by conductors and music critics. The descriptions and photographs will serve as a valuable guide for today's peripatetic performers and music lovers. With technical discussions relegated to appendices, the book can be read with pleasure by anyone interested in musical performance." "In addition, Beranek tells how composers adapt the style of their music to particular halls and how musicians adjust their playing to complement the acoustics. He also proposes a common language for musicians and acousticians." "The photographs (specially commissioned for this book) and architectural drawings (all to the same scale), together with modern acoustical data on each of the halls, provide a resource on the design of halls for presenting musical performances. Together with the technical appendices, the data and drawings will serve as an invaluable reference for architects and engineers involved in the design of spaces for the performance of music."--BOOK JACKET.

"International acoustics consultant Leo Beranek provides a well-illustrated guide to the world's important concert and opera halls, examining their acoustical quality as judged by conductors and music critics. His descriptions and photographs of 76 concert and opera halls throughout the world provide a handbook for today's peripatetic musicians and music lovers." "In addition, Dr. Beranek tells how composers adapt the style of their music to particular halls and how musicians adjust their playing to complement the acoustics. He also proposes a common language for musicians and acousticians." "The photographs, drawings to the same scale, and architectural and acoustical details on the 76 concert halls in 22 countries yield a gold mine of information pertinent to the design of concert halls and opera houses. The acoustical attributes of those halls, molded by shape, surface arrangements, materials, balconies, boxes, seats and suspended elements, are related to the subjective classifications, thus offering new direction to architectural and acoustical design. Finally, the appendices contain modern acoustical data on 80 concert and opera halls."--BOOK JACKET.

Acoustics is one of the youngest classical sciences, with the theoretical foundations being formulated by Lord Rayleigh in 1877. In the period between 1898 and 1905, Wallace Clement Sabine advanced the application of acoustics to architecture. But it was the development of the vacuum-tube amplifier, loudspeakers, and noise-free microphones in the second quarter of the 20th century that allowed the amassing of enough accurate data to make acoustics an effective engineering science. Before electronic equipment was invented, acousticians lacked both the means to produce specific types of sounds and to then measure the strength of them. Before these tools existed, designers of music halls could learn about acoustics only by observing other halls, speculating about which factors were responsible for glorious sonorities in one place and muddled cacophony in another. The information herein applies to any concert hall or opera house, the result of hundreds of interviews with opera and symphony orchestra conductors, performers, and music critics; of listening to music in some sixty different halls; of collecting precise acoustical measurements, accurate architectural drawings, and photographs of said halls. The story of the acoustics of many of the world's greatest halls is told as simply as possible, while maintaining technical accuracy.

In an English seaside town, Matt befriends an elderly woman who helps him fulfill his dream of surfing and learn to accept his having been adopted.