Mark Terra-Salomão | Assignment 6B: Best Final Assignment Ever!

Not to turn the best final assignment ever into a dissertation on moral philosophy, but it's my belief that now that the final project is done it would be mildly disingenuous and not particularly expedient or useful on my part to actually design an acoustic ceiling and talk about it as if I had done it before the fact. (Not trying to call anyone out here or anything; I just don't feel comfortable personally with talking about work I've done after the fact as if I had not.) So, in my usual iconoclastic ways, I have decided to revive an old favorite and have essentially placed a scaled-up version of Alvar Aalto's Viipuri Library lecture room acoustic ceiling into my large 120-seat theater. I've always wondered how accurate Aalto's hand studies of the acoustics were, and / or whether a computational tool could recreate these studies in a fraction of the time it took Aalto.

I used Sonic's complex surface casting function. I placed the point where the theater's speaker room would be, simply because that's where most of the sound in the theater would come from (and also because Aalto's ceiling was designed to accommodate one source point at the front of the space). Ignoring the fact that Sonic likes to raycast through the surface, it seems that the acoustics of Viipuri would actually work quite well for this theater. And why reinvent the wheel, amirite? (WRONG!)

Anyway, if I were to 3D print this "tile" it would just have to be immensely scaled down, as it is not so much a tile as an entire ceiling datum. Indeed, this is what I have done with the STL file.

The scaled-down tile compared to the overall ceiling assembly

Assuming that I would actually place this object into my theater - which I already established I wouldn't, but let's try and suspend our disbelief - materially it would be more or less the same as the Viipuri Library's ceiling; that is, shaped sitecast concrete clad with high-quality wood. This is only partially a shameless cop-out, as there is a good reason to use wood - many kinds of wood have good acoustic properties. I'll never forget this because it was ingrained into my mind by my elementary-school music appreciation teacher. She would always complain that when they restored the school they didn't replace the music room's crappy metal doors with nice, acoustic, soundproofed wooden ones. Specifically I think I would use Australian or African blackwood for the ceiling cladding, as blackwood is a tonewood (wood used for making musical instruments) that according to guitar makers (via Wikipedia) is prized for "warm, clear, bright sound with good volume."

Carolina Tamayo | Assignment 6B

For my theater tile, I decided to tie it back to one of the main features of my design: the facade.  I made my tile with the same square pattern seen in the elevation.  The only difference is that I pushed and pulled the squares in the tile to provide a desired sound effect. 

Problem | The problem with my theaters is that they sit right on top of each other so the bottom theater has a roof that slants backward.  In order to get the sound to the seats at the back, the tile would be placed in the slanted roof.  

Material | The tile would be made out of a hard, smooth material like plastic or gypsum board that would reflect the sound to the theaters at the back. The sonic image and other diagrams are represented bellow. 

Carolina Tamayo | Assignment 6A

Simple Surface

Complex Surface

Multiple Surfaces

Theater Surfaces