O P E N A I R T H E AT R E

OPEN AIR THEATRE

“Acoustics first became associated with architecture when men began to assemble in
groups to hear speeches, listen to music and see and hear plays.”

To create a favourable setting for such activities the Greek and Roman open-air theatres
and forums evolved, and many of them have survived to this day.
The typical open-air amphitheatre consists of steeply banked benches arranged in a
semicircle (in front of a platform).
 ACOUSTICAL DESIGN PRINCIPLES
The following points should be observed in the design of the open-air theatre:

The site should be away from industrial or community noise.

The noise level on the site should not exceed 40 DB and occasional disturbance exceeding
this value should not occur more than once in an hour.
The theatre should preferably be constructed in sound shadow cast by hill, an
embankment across any noisy zones.
The prevailing wind direction should not be from the noisy zone towards the theatre but
away from it.
 ACOUSTICAL DESIGN PRINCIPLES

Tall trees must form the rear boundary of the theatre as they are very useful in absorbing
external noise and preventing delayed sound reflections inside the theater which
otherwise cause echoes. Plus they also lend a nice landscape to the theatre.
The floor should be properly graded, to give good visibility and audibility to all the rows
of the listeners
The slope of the floor should be towards the stage and it should be about 12 to 15
degrees to the horizontal.
The shape of the theatre should be such that most of the audience is drawn close to the
stage.
A semicircular shape admirably satisfies this condition but it does not suite to the
directional properties of the sound.
 To have satisfactory sound levels at all the places a fan shape theatre is considered
good, particularly when the stage walls and proscenium reinforcement cause the sound
levels at the remote places by reflection.
ACOUSTICAL DESIGN PRINCIPLES

The direction of the prevailing winds must be from the stage towards the audience
The stage walls and ceilings must be designed to obtain maximum throw and diffusion
of sound towards remote places.
The back wall of the stage must be vertical, with plane or convex corrugation for the
reflection.
The sidewalls should be splayed outwards to avoid fluttering of sound and to obtain
beneficial reflection.
The sound level distribution may be estimated by the method of images.
The sound intensity drops off as the inverse square of the distance. The side walls are
also provide with corrugations. The stage ceiling should slope upwards so as to arrest
and throw the outgoing sound onto the audience.
 ACOUSTICAL DESIGN PRINCIPLES

The capacity of the open-air theatre should not exceed about 600 persons if they are to
hear clearly and the performers are to speak without strain.
However with adequate sound amplification the theater may accommodate more persons.
The area of the theatre excluding the stage may be calculated at the rate of 0.8to 1sqm per
person, including gangways.
If the seats are so staggered that every seat is displaced sideways from one in front by half
the width of the seat, the area provided should be about 1 to 1.20 sqm per person.
Sound absorption by the audience, unoccupied seats and the air must be taken into
account into the design.
Factors such as humidity, temperature, fog and the wind velocity, which affect the sound
transmission, must be considered
 OPEN AIR THEATRE

With the passage of time the platform evolved into a stage with massive rear and
sidewalls of masonry (and sometimes a ceiling) that served the acoustical purpose of
reflecting, directing and thereby reinforcing the sound intended for the audience.
Vitruvius, the first-century Roman architect and engineer, wrote that large vases tuned
as resonators were often located in the seating area to reinforce certain sounds.
Whether or not such vases were actually used is uncertain, but in any case they could
only have absorbed sound, not reinforced it.
 OPEN AIR THEATRE

The principal defect of the Greek and Roman theatres is that the semicircular tiers of
seats act as reflectors that tend to focus sounds from the stage back to a point on or
near the stage.
 Moreover, the echoes from concentric tiers are re-inforced at certain frequencies and
diminished at others.

The reason is that the vertical risers,

which form the backs of the
benches, create an level of
uniformly spaced reflecting surfaces.
Constructive Interference

Focus on
stage

The sound reflected from the tiers of benches produces a sustained echo whose
characteristic pitch is determined by the distance separating adjacent risers.

• As a result, when speech or music is heard in an open-air theatre or in a room or

auditorium in which there are parallel and uniformly placed reflecting surfaces the
reflected sound may suffer a serious distortion in frequency.
• Fortunately in an open-air theatre these frequency-dependent reflections generally
pass over the heads of the audience, but since the reflections come to a focus on
the stage they can be extremely disturbing to per-formers rehearsing in an empty
theatre.
ACOUSTICAL DESIGN PRINCIPLES

Proper acoustics of a building means two things:

1. Control of noise at an acceptable level
Noise control measures commonly comprise of the selection of site in the quite area
and treatment against the structure and air borne noise.
2. Distinct speech or music audibility by the whole audience inside the enclosure
The desired hearing conditions depend largely upon the shape and the size of the
hall, the total sound absorptions available and whether or not the hall is provided
with sound amplification systems; the type of activity is also a predominant
consideration.
 ACOUSTICAL DESIGN PRINCIPLES

• An open-air theatre has no roof overhead, although it may have an enclosing barrier all
around.

• The absence of a roof and therefore of a reverberant field, demands high accuracy in
predicting the early reflections.

• The energy dissipates quickly in this type of enclosures and there is little masking effect of
the reverberation. The inverse cone shape of these theatres also puts serious limitations
to the image-source method, where great areas are in the shadow zone of the mirroring
surface.

Reflected sound
Direct sound

The circular shape means sound is reflected

back into the auditorium, this increases sound
intensity.
• In the simple model the seating area (cavea) is shaped as sloping surfaces and the back
wall (proscenium) behind the stage is modelled as a plane surface. In the detailed model,
the cavea is defined with seat rows and stairs, a colonnade behind the last row and a
more detailed proscenium.
• One of the reasons for the detailed model to give better results is that definition of the
rows on the cavea horizontal reflections between cavea and proscenium.
• The sound will in this case bounces back and forth between the vertical seat rises and
the proscenium wall. These reflections will arrive at a listener position with large delay
and attenuation but will nevertheless contribute to a long reverberation time.
 REFLECTION PATHS IN A SIMPLE AND DETAILED CAVEA.

It has been shown that in simulations of open-air roman theatres the definition of the
seating area has a big impact on the acoustics of the room. When the cavea of the
theatre is modelled
1. AS SLOPED SURFACES
 the theatre will resemble the shape of an inverse cone.
 This shape will tend to direct most of the reflections towards the open sky and
therefore the energy will dissipate quickly leaving few late reflections.
2. DETAILED SEATING AREA
 A detailed seating area with rows and steps allows horizontal reflections between
seat rises and proscenium resulting in higher accordance with measured data.