Acoustical design and scale model test for the opera house of Zhongshan city

• Published in: The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 2008-05, Vol.123 (5_Supplement), p.3097-3097
• Main Authors: Wu, Shuo Xian, Zhao, Yue Zhe
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0001-4966; 1520-8524
• DOI: 10.1121/1.2932951

The opera house of Zhongshan City in Guangdong province of China is the performing art center of the city. It was completed in Oct. 2005. It has 1400 seats including 833 stall seats and another 484 seats on two levels of balcony. The volume of the auditorium is 12000m3 and the V/N is 9.1m3 per seat. The main purpose of the building is for the performances of opera and ballet. Some music and conference events are also to be held there. Therefore, the occupied reverberation time at medium frequencies is set to be 1.6s and its background noise level has to meet NR-20. During the acoustical design, a 3D computer simulation model established with ODEON software and a 1:20 scale model was made to analyze the sound fields of the auditorium with and without a music shell on the stage. After the completion of the building, an acoustics test was taken. Several performances show that its acoustics reaches a quite high level and has won high praises.