If you’re at a concert or a live music venue, you often hear the sound of instruments reverberating throughout the space. Reverberation, often called reverb in the music industry, is the persistence of sound after the original source, like a note or a verse, has stopped.
Reverb is generally appealing to the ear, and is commonplace in music performances. It’s affected by the physical design of a space – like floors, walls and ceilings – and depending on those factors, the music emitted from a vocalist or instrument can create a sort of echo effect.
Digital reverb, a relatively new and evolving technology, changed the game completely – to where the effect of reverb can be added instantaneously to live music through digital speakers or instrument plug-ins.
The Stella Boyle Smith Concert Hall at the University of Arkansas Fine Arts Center is taking digital reverb to new heights. As part of the Fine Arts Center’s recent restoration project, the concert hall’s audio system now allows for an innovative, electronic “manipulation” of reverb.
E-Coustic Systems is an acoustic system and enhancement developer who created the technology now used in Stella Boyle. Their products are used in places around the world, like Millennium Park in Chicago and the Brazilian Opera in Sao Paulo.
Steve Barbar is the president of E-Coustic Systems. He also worked at Lexicon in the late ‘70s, a company accredited with releasing the first, most widely used commercial digital reverb system. He says this specific technology, now being used at Stella Boyle Smith Concert Hall, can expand the limits of a venue or space.
“E-Coustic Systems is the evolution of technology called LARES, which we developed in the early nineties, we’ll call it. It was developed at a company called Lexicon. We developed this methodology for altering acoustics electronically, and we have ever since been designing, integrating systems in venues throughout the world.”
Barbar says the goal of the technology is to provide musicians the ability to play with reverberation outside of the constraints of any particular space.
“We’ve installed this technology in a wide variety of venues. The smallest spaces where we’ve installed this are actually practice rooms for music education. We’re not trying to recreate an actual concert hall in that space but we are providing enough of an acoustical change so that the musician can get a feeling for how it might affect their playing in different spaces.
When it comes to a room like Stella Boyle, the space is too small, literally, to support acoustic music properly. So by applying the technology, you’re providing the equivalent of, probably $3-4 million worth of raising the roof to provide the added volume necessary to make it optimum.”
Alan Gosman is the chair of the University of Arkansas music department. He says the new audio system has a wide variety of settings used for ensemble and solo performances.
“We don't want a reverb for a lecture, so we turn it off for that… You can turn it off or have minimal reverb. We have settings for the different ensembles. So you might come in and you're a jazz ensemble and you just have two choices as a jazz ensemble, or you're a solo pianist… And I think there are three settings for solo piano, so you might try all of them. So there's some guidance to what you might want to do. But we have pianists who decide they like the jazz setting better for an ensemble.
There are a lot of student recitals, and for these first weeks, people haven't generally worked alone on creating the settings. It's usually a team process, teaching you how to do it and what the buttons are. The buttons aren't right on stage, so it's helpful to have someone in the back press this, one point two reverb, and try it. So I would say the beginning of just coming to the hall, getting ready for a recital, this is a new step that we never had before.”
One of the system’s most exciting reverb effects is a cathedral setting. While the effect is significantly stronger in person at the hall itself, listen to University of Arkansas cellist instructor Jennifer Carpenter performing the start of a Bach piece (the first bars of the Prelude from Bach’s Cello Suite #3 in C major) without the effect… And with the cathedral setting.
UofA Cellist instructor Jennifer Carpenter says the effect of the reverb system has a strong impact on performance.
“Every other space that I've ever performed in, it's you, the performer, adjusting to the hall… And having your colleagues go out into the hall and listen back and tell you, ‘oh, you need to be more here’, or, ‘oh, you can really play nice in pianissimo. We're picking it up in the back of the hall.’ But here, where the hall can adjust to you, it is… It's definitely fun. I would say it's very interesting that you don't have to only make those adjustments yourself, but that the hall can do some of that for you.”
In terms of accessibility, Jennifer says this kind of technical support provides an important opportunity for student musicians to hear their work in a wide variety of spaces- all from one concert hall.
“I think it's really great because you can have all sorts of different ensembles performing in here and sound really great. You could have one solo string player and then you can set the reverb to sound, you know, just right, just the correct amount of resonance for that. And then you can also have a large jazz band and you can adjust the reverb so that it's not overwhelming to the audience, but it just makes it sound really good.
“I'm very excited for audiences to be here and hear a variety of different ensembles, and also just because it's really cool. I think audiences are already excited about this.”
Funds for Stella Boyle’s new acoustic system were provided by the Walton Family Charitable Support Foundation. To stay updated on upcoming performances at the concert hall, you can visit the UARK campus calendar.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline and edited for length and clarity. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
