Now that we have the context, we can talk about the first of two halls; the Vienna Music Association’s Großer Musikvereinssaal (Great Hall, also called the Golden Hall because it was – you guessed it – gold). The Golden Hall, opened in 1870, is by all accounts, one of the best and most renowned concert halls in the world and is considered the epitome of acoustic performance for classical and romantic orchestral music globally. It features a balanced reverberation time, which is the amount of time it takes for sound to fade away, providing support for the orchestra while still retaining good clarity. Similarly, the side walls are narrow enough to have good lateral support and early lateral reflections which contribute to the spatial impressions of intimacy and envelopment. The architectural design of it, however, is incredibly dull. This is not to take away from its grandiose nature as it is after all, a 53 m long, 20 m wide, and 18 m high shoebox-style concert hall clad in gold. However, the design process for it simply involved taking a previous concert hall that had well-received acoustics and scaling it up by around 20% to accommodate a larger orchestra and audience. Prior to the foundations of modern architectural acoustics in the 20th century, this design process of scaling by a similar ratio was a common approach that led to several of the other most renowned halls to this day, including the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, Leipzig Neues Gewanghaus, and Boston Music Hall, the predecessor to the Symphony Hall.

While the Golden Hall represented the very best of acoustics, our second hall, the Royal Albert Hall in London, represents the worst. Immediately after its opening in 1871, the acoustics were immediately hated, with reviews complaining about the severe echo caused by the dome over the elliptically-shaped hall. Compared with reverberation, an echo is caused when there is a gap between sounds causing a distinct separation and is usually caused by sound reflecting off distant surfaces, and this was certainly the case with the Royal Albert Hall. Interestingly, the elliptical hall shape evolved from the idea of voice directivity which has roots in the ancient Greek and Roman semi-circular outdoor theatres. The idea, as described by Vitruvius in the Ten Books of Architecture, was that sound propagated out in circular waves, as a pebble dropped in water. However, architects understood that narrower side walls would help carry sound towards the back. Milan’s La Scala has a horseshoe-shaped hall for this reason and was revered by the architects of the Royal Albert Hall as being lyrically excellent. Working on the measurements found by George Saunders’ experiments with voice in outdoor theatres, the architects and acousticians decided to scale up the design of the Royal Albert Hall, under the assumption that the voice would carry further indoors. The final design for the Royal Albert Hall accommodates approximately 5200 people – almost three times as many as the 1700 capacity in the Golden Hall - and even with its 1969 acoustic renovations, it holds one of the worst-performing acoustic reputations today.

It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, yet we entered the 20th century with many of the greatest (and admittedly, worst) concert halls ever built. Mind you, this was all done before we had ways to acoustically measure… well anything. But luckily, that’s where we move to next.