<<I'd love to hear some of your recommendations/rumors about
locations with unusual
acoustics, long reverb, echo's etc. Doesn't matter where they are.>>
Just north of San Francisco in the Marin Headlands National Park is a
complex of abandoned coastal defense artillery emplacements. These
are connected by a series of tunnels big enough to drive two army
trucks side by side through to supply each gun. Several of these
tunnels are as much as a quarter mile long, concrete, with a
rectangular cross section. The reverberation in there is quite
spectacular, very non-diffuse. A number of side chambers lead off the
main tunnels.
I recall running across a location on the SUNY Potsdam campus where
two perfectly parallel concrete walls face each other across a small
courtyard. At the focal point the reflections are separate & non-
diffuse & ring for an extraordinarily long time.
A couple weeks ago during a concert set up in the Palacio De Belles
Artes in Mexico City I noticed the upstage area, 100 or so feet back
of the proscenium, provided a highly resonant metallic comb-filtered
set of reflections, normally associated with electronic flanging or
phase shifting effects. Generally any complex curve leading to a
reflective surface, as often found in theatrical spaces, especially
those insufficiently diffuse ones which I would describe as not
particularly well designed acoustically, will provide some version of
this effect.
Generally highly reverberant spaces are man-made & result from large
flat reflective surfaces without much diffusion, or enclosed spaces
of simple geometry, but there certainly are natural instances as well.
Scott Fraser
|