On November 18th, AIRIS LAB invited Dr. Yasushi Shimizu to give a lecture at our lab.
The lecture was titled “The Sound Field Control of Concert Hall and Public Space with Physical and
Electroacoustic Means”.
The lecture started at 10 a.m., and Dr. Shimizu delivered a passionate talk on the combination of room acoustics and electroacoustics, which has become a major focus of his research.
The lecture began with an overview of ancient technologies in architectural aspect, followed by a discussion on how architectural features have influenced sound design and construction with corresponding example images. Dr. Shimizu also presented the historical evolution of concert hall designs, covering various room shapes chronologically, such as the Arena style, Shoebox style, Proscenium style, and more.
In the first section, which covered the historical evolution, the second part focused on sound field synthesis and topics related to early reflections and reverberation. To illustrate sound field synthesis, studio information and images were also included.
For reverberation enhancement, Dr. Shimizu explained the overall principles within the context of signal processing. He also discussed speech privacy, a topic that has become increasingly relevant in recent years. He elaborated on how to design rooms that guarantee speech privacy and explained six different masker-to-noise ratio settings in acoustic environments. This topic was particularly interesting.
Through this lecture, our lab members, including Professor Kim, gained a deeper understanding of the history of acoustics from an architectural perspective, as well as sound field synthesis through signal processing. It was a great experience for all of us, and we sincerely appreciate Dr. Shimizu for delivering such a meaningful lecture.