Stop the Stadium

Trust Us… We’re the Experts

By Ian Smith

I recently came across a previously undiscovered ‘thread’ on the ‘StS’ web-site and for once, a matter under discussion was a subject in which I have an interest, namely ‘acoustics’.

This comes about in a rather roundabout way, beginning with a video project I have been involved with for the last three years. During that time, I have assembled something like seventy DVD-discs of documentary material relating to the Otago Coastline; to be specific, a journey from North to South down its entire length, from the Waitaki River Mouth in the North, to the ‘Brothers’ Peninsula far down the Catlins, where Otago ceases and Southland begins. Much of this I have traversed on foot and the project is beyond the halfway mark.

One problem area in such an undertaking is background music. Originally I helped myself to the classics freely, using minutes at a time of ‘Sibelius’, ‘Ravel’, ‘Mendelssohn’, ‘Scriabin’ and countless others. Having been interested in film-making since the 1960s, through the era when the 16mm camera reigned supreme, to today’s much more practical option of video, I didn’t give much thought to the matter of copyright, until I read an article dealing with wholesale piracy of music from internet sources. Perhaps my project would also be affected. So I set about devising a solution for the problem.

Music lessons had been part of my daily routine since the age of six. The half-hour daily I was lined up by my parents to practice, was never going to make me into another Menuhin, but as I approached the age of eighteen or so, thirty minutes was just nice time to dash off the ‘Franck’ A-major sonata, or one of the simpler Concertos, which I played tolerably well. My tutor and I frequently played the two instrumental parts of the Bach ‘Double-Concerto’ but I hankered to hear my efforts against the background of Bach’s orchestra, which would have given the music much more sense, immediacy and meaning for me.

‘Fast-forward’ more than half a century, and here I am at it again, this time trying my hand at composition. As a youngster, I’d always had a yen to be a composer, to create vast Symphonies, which dazzled the World with my brilliance and cemented my place forever amongst the rich and famous. The reality, of course, is vastly different; even Beethoven had been forced, at one stage, to ‘moonlight’ by turning out batches of ‘Scottish Songs’ for a publisher in Edinburgh. To hell with string quartets and chamber music, I’d dive straight in at the deep end with a Piano Concerto, or a Symphony or two.

Except, life’s just not like that. Yes, there’s a ‘Piano Concerto’, it’s half finished and I am quite pleased with it, to date. Those fifteen-hour days I have put in at the computer are beginning to bear fruit. It’s an unashamedly ‘populist’ effort, able to be enjoyed, I would hope, by people with no particular background in the classics; like the Saint-Saens ‘Fourth’ or the lovely little ‘Scriabin’, but not half as adventurous.

There are two things you soon become acutely aware of when scoring music for an orchestra: the need to appreciate the ranges and limitations of a diverse range of vastly different instruments, and the role played by acoustics in the best possible presentation of the material.

To Judith’s consternation, I invested more than $1000 in software, carefully evaluated beforehand, and then downloaded from various overseas sources. She capitulated in the end by working out that ‘At least it keeps him occupied and happy’, as indeed it does. The orchestral ‘samplings’ (notes played in every mode possible by a range of different instruments), came from the ‘Garritan’ web site in Washington DC. This site also runs ‘tutorials’ on composition, orchestration and a number of other facets of music-making, and a lot can be learned from them. In addition, the London-based ‘Philharmonia’ makes available many music scores for study. If I have a query as to how Ravel might have orchestrated some part of the ‘Daphnis and Chloe’ ballet music, or how Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov suggested the motion of long ocean swells, as he did at the beginning of his ‘Scheherezade’, logging onto the appropriate web- site and having a ‘shufti’ at the orchestral score can frequently clarify matters.

Acoustics come into the picture from a different standpoint. The reproduction of music on a computer involves the use of the sound card’s sixteen MIDI channels. These ‘channels’ do not carry ‘sounds’; they carry blocks of binary code, which convey the music’s pitch, timbre and other characteristics. Unlike a piano, they don’t involve a percussive hammer-blow on a stretched string which fades away, to generate notes; they are like an organ, in which the sound is usually either ‘on’ or ‘off’. The ‘shaping’ of notes to imitate the ways the instruments of the orchestra ‘sound’ when played, must be done by other means.

Now, to come to the point. Acoustically, computer-generated music is ‘dead’ or if you prefer, ‘neutral’. Except in rare cases, there is none of the ‘character’ of a live performance in it when written and performed using a computer, My final step with each ‘piece’ I have written, (I have already done quite a few short snippets and added them to my video), is to breathe ‘life’ into it by placing it in an ‘ambience’ and of course, the ideal medium is the concert-hall.

That is how I have a working familiarity with the electronics/acoustics interface in the process, and how I know that there are limitations to what can be accomplished in the way of sound modification by means of software. To simply infer that bad acoustics can be overcome by someone sitting behind a sound-engineer’s console is, in my opinion, both ludicrous, and laughably wide of the mark. Many badly recorded CDs can testify to that.

Take the nature of sound, itself. It proceeds outwards, away from its source at the speed of, well, ‘sound’. Depending on what the soundwaves encounter on their journey it may be deflected, absorbed, reflected, partly neutralised by interaction with its own ‘out-of-phase’ components, and so-on. The playing of a ‘piece’ in an empty concert-hall during rehearsal, is vastly different to the same piece on the night of the performance when the same space is ‘peopled’, since the presence of an audience has roughly similar powers of sound-absorption as heavily carpeted floors (and possibly walls); or in the household situation, heavy drapes, upholstered furniture, pot-plants and other domestic accoutrements.

The bald statement that bad acoustics are able to be overcome by electronics and sophisticated software is valid, up to a point, but beyond certain limits, the very nature and physics of sound ensure that this cannot be so. We are all familiar with the ‘echo’ phenomenon, which is so noticeable in large spaces, garbled speech in announcements in large stadia and airport buildings. Beyond a certain size of venue, the sound’s out-of-phase components tend to be reflected back towards the listener. When they are one-hundred and eighty degrees out of phase, for example, the nett effect is ‘subtractive’; the signal is partly cancelled out by its own diminished reflection back towards the source. It is necessary when setting up a stereo system, for example, to ensure that identically phased signals fed to the two (or more) speakers cause the speaker-cones to move in the same direction on the same signal, otherwise your 300w RMS ‘beast’ will never be capable of starting that landslide in the back garden.

With my music, I am careful to create ‘space’ around the virtual orchestra by means of ‘Reverb’ and similar devices. These usually come in the form of VST filters, a system borrowed from Steinberg in Germany, to offer a standard ‘plug-in’ platform across a wide range of audio software. My favourite ‘filters’ come from ‘Kjaerhus’ in Denmark; almost incredibly in this day and age, they are ‘free’ for anyone to download. I’ve tweaked the adjustments to give me my own ‘space’, 400 cubic metres, between ‘large concert hall’ and its smaller counter-part. More spacious options produce too much ‘reverb’ and things tend to ‘fly-to-pieces’ with echoes. Very much the same, I would surmise, as could occur in the Awatea Street Stadium, given the shape of the ‘building’, should this unfortunate project go-ahead.

Much will depend on the sound absorbency or reflectivity of the E.T.F.E material chosen for the outer-cladding and I think it is fair to say, in spite of claims to the contrary, that no-one involved with its design must have the faintest inkling of whether the edifice will wind up with superb acoustics, or be a total ‘bummer’. One thing, of which I am certain, is that design defects will not be able to be made-good by means of software-based modification. Above a certain cubic capacity, should the walls prove to be ‘reflective’, music will likely be distorted and garbled in many parts but the area immediately in front of the stage, the area in which sound from ‘up-front’ simply blasts everything else out of existence. Should the nett effect be ‘absorbency’, there will probably be complaints that the venue ‘didn’t do the band justice’. Given the shape of the Stadium’s shell, it is possible there will be all sorts of problems with reflections, inter-modulation products and other undesirable aberrations of any sound source featured.

Personally, I don’t care. It’s not my kind of music. I worked out long ago that music based almost solely upon rhythm was the music of those cultures, whose ascent up the evolutionary scale had not been marked by conspicuous success, while music based upon harmony, and particularly its many and manifold complexities, was the stuff of ‘intellect’. Just listen to what thunders around your neighbourhood from the ‘boom-box’ of next ‘boy-racer’ to drive down your street, and you’ll quickly catch-on. Were I to live my life over again, I would abandon my ambition for reincarnation as a stud bull, in favour of a career as an audiologist. I am sure I would never go short of prospects, given the numbers of our young people seemingly hell-bent on deafening themselves.

We are privileged to have in Dunedin, a Town Hall with acknowledged excellent acoustics. It has greater seating capacity than the Sydney Opera House, although we have had, until recently, a group of people with a seeming determination to stuff it all up. Having been, for most of the last month, on a visit to the land of Palm-trees, soft south-easterly trade-winds, lukewarm tropical rain-showers, crocodiles and bloody great mosquitoes, has allowed me to return to Dunedin with a fresh perspective on some matters.

This ‘Nirvana’ has been, as it has been on six previous occasions, Port Douglas, partway up Cape York Peninsula in Australia’s Tropical North. We have this theory, in fact, that having tried ‘the rest’, (Gold Coast, ‘Surfers’, Noosa and the like), many Kiwis will eventually follow in the footsteps of Australians in-the-know and choose what we have found to be ‘the-best’. For those of you who don’t know the ‘Port’, it is not a ‘typical’ Australian resort. The population of the town is only 3,000, which grows to 8,000 or more at the height of the tourist ‘season’.

Port Douglas has been administered until recently by the Douglas Shire Council, a body that had taken great pains to preserve the town’s ‘village’ atmosphere. For that reason, no building rises more than three storeys, local by-laws simply don’t permit it. Developers wishing to maximise profit by building ‘high-rises’ on small ‘footprints’, have found their efforts thwarted. ‘McDonalds’ gave up and left town after not getting their own way with their trade- mark, the hideous ‘Big M’ sign. It could be put up, but was not to be illuminated, day or night.

The town depends, to a great extent, on the proximity of the Great Barrier Reef, the planet’s largest living organism, and the reef is highly sensitive to run-off, particularly if it contains traces of detergent and chemical residues from the various resorts, especially those close to the beach. We lived for a month at ‘Treetops’ and for another on ‘Solander Boulevard’ on earlier visits and became aware that some resorts were forced to wash dishes under high-pressure water, rather than use detergents. That certainly applied, when we stayed at ‘Treetops’. In the staff dining-room, no discharge of dish-washing agent was permitted at all.

In the tradition that nothing which runs smoothly and to everyone’s satisfaction will remain beyond the reach of the ‘stuffers-up’ and their dubious talents indefinitely, the Shire Council has been replaced, by edict, with rule from Cairns. For most of Port Douglas’s history most things ‘went-south’ to its larger neighbour, because that’s where the political clout’ lay. There is something else, which will resonate with Dunedin citizens in Port Douglas’s plight. There was absolutely no consultation, nor even a pretence of it.

The matter has been taken up at the highest level, namely with Queensland Premier Anna Bligh who was due to visit the town on the day after we set out to fly home. The Port Douglas people had promised her a ‘meeting she would remember’ and knowing them as I do, every endeavour would have been taken to ensure that was what she would get.

The alternative is almost as unthinkable as the prospect of our Stadium. The ‘developers’ will flock into the resort, and Cairns interests will create a ‘satellite’ in the image of their own city. Now, I have nothing much against Cairns, I have stayed there many times for a day or to on the way ‘to’ or ‘from’; but I know where I would rather be, of choice.

And, therein lies the difference between the people of Port Douglas and Dunedin. In Port Douglas, people do not sit on their hands, eyes firmly fixed on their navels and wait for everyone else to fulfil their wish-list for them; they get themselves involved, and do something about the situation. When they say they will withhold their rates, I for one, wouldn’t count-on-it not happening.

I fear that the ludicrous edifice proposed for Awatea St looks likely to go-ahead. The next step will almost certainly be ‘fast-tracking’ to ensure completion before the 2011 World Cup. To do so, the Council will likely have to bend, or even break, most of its own rules. There will, of course, be very plausible reasons for doing do, and an aura of ‘integrity’ will pervade every fresh development. We will allow this because we are complacent and spineless. Others of us will take the view that we must defer to the Council and CST in the matter, because they are the ‘experts’… Let’s see how they shape-up with ‘acoustics.’