Word: soundness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...beyond the pipes and valves, a wholly new experience awaits U.S. audiences. Boettcher is the first "surround" music hall in the country, with 360° seating around the orchestra. There are a few such auditoriums elsewhere-in Mexico City and Berlin-but orthodox acousticians still believe that the best sound is heard in long, narrow rectangular spaces. In Boettcher, there are "terraces" at several levels from which the audience can watch the players from different angles and much more intimately; no seat is farther than 85 ft. from the stage and most are within...
...acoustics are very good, and that is a triumph as well as a vindication for Acoustician Christopher Jaffe, 50. The problem with a circular design is that sound diffuses quickly, bounces around, losing clarity and focus. Jaffe, with the Boettcher architects, Hardy, Holzman, Pfeiffer Associates, has managed to create a lush, integral sound by using such devices as 106 acrylic "reflector" discs suspended from the ceiling and a huge vault below the stage. There are some minor, doubtless correctable difficulties. The bass is not quite rich enough. When Van Cliburn sat down on opening night to slam his way through...
...slips. The world premiere of John Green's Mine Eyes Have Seen, a huge, jazzy work that might better be called Mine Ears Have Heard, had both thunder and clarity. It got a standing ovation. Said Jaffe with some understatement: "That was a great big body of sound...
...seismic scars and snowcapped mountain ranges. Our destination: a tiny pioneer village aptly named Alonka (wasteland). The temperature: 50° F. below zero. On even chillier days, the cold at Alonka becomes literally audible: the moisture of exhaled breath freezes instantly, and the colliding crystals make a rustling sound. The Jeep-like vehicles used by the construction crews had quilts on their hoods; at a bridge construction site, workers were busy "cooking" concrete in warm elevated shacks before pouring it into foundations. The bridge, begun eight months ago, was due to be finished at the end of March...
Many battered men manage to convince themselves that their marriages are sound and their beatings are trivial. The British social worker Erin Pizzey, founder of a refuge for battered women in London, notes that abused men are so good at self-deception that they often refuse to acknowledge the beatings at all. "Mostly they don't see themselves on the receiving end," she adds, "even though they're scratched and bitten or hit by instruments." In fact, she says, many of the men who show up at her center are originally reported as wife beaters, but turn...