Tag: music

Emanuel Vigeland Mausoleum

A beautiful reverb surrounded by vivid and explicit frescos.

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This doesn’t appear very high on lists of tourist attractions in Oslo, but it deserves to be much better known. It was built in 1926 by the artist Emanuel Vigeland as a gallery. Luckily, for sound tourists the windows were later filled in when it was turned into the artist’s mausoleum. Every surface in the room is now concrete or stone, and this means the sound bounces and rings around the room for an extraordinary long time. Norwegian acoustician and composer Tor Halmrast describes it as the most reverberant place for its size that he had ever experienced. When I sang a few notes, the notes hung in the air for 10-15 seconds. I can see why musicians like to perform there, because the reverb is very rich and seems to gradually cascade down from the ceiling.

Here is a simple balloon burst I recorded:

An acoustic analysis of the balloon burst and the acoustics can be found here.

The room is more dimly lit than the photo above shows, but after a while once your eyes have adapted to the dark you start to pick out the frescos covering the walls and ceiling that depict conception, life and death in very explicitly. One of the most famous mural is above the door just above the urn holding the artist’s ashes. A plume of babies rise above a pair of skeletons reclining in the missionary position.

Location and logistics

There are official tours of the site.

Great Stalacpipe Organ, USA

Ringing stalactites create strange ethereal sounds from this huge musical instrument.

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This is a bizarre musical instrument. It was dreamt up and painstakingly constructed by Leland Sprinkle, a mathematician and electronic engineer in the 1950s. Rocks that ring have been used as musical instruments for thousands of years. But this is the only lithophone I know of based on stalactites.

It’s claimed to be the largest natural musical instrument in the world, generating a beautiful, ghostly and disorientating sound. The cave acoustics make it difficult to locate where the sounds are coming from. 37 stalactites produce the different notes of a musical scale. But the tuning isn’t entirely natural, as some sanding of the natural formations was needed to get the notes exactly in tune. Small rubber hammers strike the stalactites; these are electronically controlled by an organ keyboard.

Locations and logistics

Luray Cavern’s website with opening hours etc.

Credits and sources

  1. Sound released by Luray Caverns into public domain
  2. Photo: KristopherM (c) some rights reserved
  3. Photo:lossanjose (c) some rights reserved

Singing roads

A road which plays tunes using rumble strips.

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Want to listen to a poor quality, out-of-tune rendition of a famous melody when driving your car? No need for an expensive car stereo, a singing road can do this using wheel vibrations.

If you drift off the side of a road and hit a rumble strip, you’ll get a distinctive sound intended to alert you and prevent an accident. The pitch of the sound you get depends on the spacing between the bumps or ridges. So if you make lots of ridges like a rumble strip and vary the spacing between the ridges correctly, then different musical notes can be made. Close together ridges (say 6mm apart) give high notes, and far apart ridges (say 12mm apart) give low notes. Make the right pattern of ridges then as a car drives over them, a tune is played. Mind you, in most cases the sound quality is pretty poor, and if the car is at the wrong speed it sounds even worse. Rather amusingly, when Honda tried to create such a road for an advert, they got the spacing wrong and so their version of the William Tell Over­ture was very out of tune. Here is my acoustic analysis of the road.

Videos of musical roads in USA, South Korea, Japan and Denmark

Location

In City of Lancaster, USA, the road is found along the westbound stretch of Avenue G between 30th and 40th Streets West. It was moved from its original site following concerns about noise disturbing nearby houses.

Alternatively, the Japanese have the most melody roads: twelve listed here. Suggested optimum driving speed is 28mph (45km/h). Those shown on the map are:

  • Hokkaido: drive west
  • Route 370, Wakayama prefecture, plays Miagetegoran Yorunohoshiwo
  • Numata-shi, Gunma prefecture, plays “Natsuno Omoide (Summer Memories)”

The road in Anyang, Gyeonggi, South Korea is meant to play Mary Had a Little Lamb when driving at 100 Km/h and was designed to help motorists stay alert. However, the videos I have heard all sound pretty terrible and the tune is unrecognizable.

Credits and sources

  1. Map photo: shidax (c) some rights reserved

Sea organ

The organ buried in the promenade makes a haunting but harmonious sound through the motion of the sea.

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Driven by waves this organ creates notes at random. Despite the unpredictability of the sounds, overall what is heard is surprisingly harmonious. This happens because the different organ pipes have been carefully tuned to only produce certain musical notes that sound good together [1].

The sculpture is seventy meters long and has thirty-five organ pipes built under the concrete; as you move along the promenade the sounds and harmonies change. The movement of the waves push air in and out of the organ pipes to create the notes. It was designed by architect Nikola Bašić.

Location

Visit Zadar website.

There is a wave organ in San Francisco and also a high tide organ in Blackpool. But the Zadar organ is the most tuneful and effective.

Credits

Vienna Musikverein

Possibly the best and most famous concert hall for classical music.

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If you were to take a straw poll among acoustic engineers to find the best concert hall in World, then the Musikverein would come pretty close to the top: it might even top the list. It’s one of four concert halls around the World that are commonly cited as sound exemplars, with extraordinary acoustics against which all new designs are compared. Like all good concert halls, the Musikverein provide sound reflections that enrich the orchestral sound. Without these reflections, the music would sound rather thin and distant.

Scientists have spent many decades trying to unlock the secrets of the hall, and perhaps the most important feature is its diminutive floor size. People are packed together in a way which wouldn’t be allowed in a new building because of modern fire regulations. This results in a very lively sound; the music reverberates and echoes for a long time, bouncing around the hall, creating sound that seems to envelope the listener. It’s ideally suited to the music of Brahms, Bruckner, and Mahler; these famous composers all had music premiered here.

360 video

Location and logistics

Website: Book a concert, or second best, go on a tour.

Credits

Photo: By Li Sun – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0