4 Plans

My review on Wednesday went well! 

I came up with four layouts for the well 

1. Jury En Banc - Center
2. Jury En Banc - Off Center
3. Jury In Round - Center
4. Jury In Round - Off Center

So, I hope you have been keeping up with some of the acoustic vernacular. I tested each layout for STI, Total SPL, RT, C50, and to examine the 3rd order reflection patterns. 

A picture is worth a thousand words so take a look at everything I presented on Wednesday:

Revamping the Well.

So, we have been over the acoustic side effects of a circle, now let's cover the architectural side effects of a circle.

Obviously, everyone faces each other in a circle and attention is, more or less, focused at the central point of the circle. When a person speaks, the attention usually switches to that person. With that in mind, the potential architectural side effects are:

• If anyone is in the center, their back is always to someone (duh)
• While the gallery (audience) seating can be circularly arranged to encompass the well, doing so would introduce lots of issues with people being behind the judge...how does he or she get in and out? What about the Jury, Attorneys and Witnesses? Do they have to go through the gallery?
• Smaller diameter circle means more intimate setting - seating around the circle is closer, this can be good or bad.
• Larger diameter circle means more spacious seating but the distances could affect speech intelligibility and the well takes up more space in the courtroom.
• Who gets to be in the circle? Are multiple circles possible? (This is where the majority of my attention will be)

While I don't have the solution perfectly figured out, I do believe the changes I have made to the circular arrangement of the courtroom are pointed in the right direction. 

Basically, I thought of the circular court as a sports game and venue (Football Stadium, Soccer Stadium, Boxing Ring, Bull Fighting Arena, Wrestling Ring etc.) All of these events and accompanying venues have a "circular" arrangement. Examining these layouts has proved to be helpful in determining a viable solution. More on this later! 

I have another review on Wednesday, the purpose of this review is to get feedback on these revamped well layouts and show how they perform acoustically (those tests will occur between now and then.) I will have a public defender from Atlanta and outside acoustician at the review, so the feedback should be good! Here is a teaser of what I plan to have for review...

Version 1 (view from the entrance and gallery seating)

Version 2 (view from the gallery and entrance)

Version 2 (Juror view in well)

Version 2 (attorney view in well - far)

 Version 2 (Judge View)

Version 2 (Lectern 1 view in well)

Version 2 (Court reporter view in well) 

 Shout out to Tucker and Kristen Wigington for letting me use their WiFi to post this! 

Circle Side Effects!

In the last post I talked about "Circle Side Effects" so I will explain what I meant by that. 

Have you ever been to the room where they keep The U.S Constitution in D.C? You might have noticed this room is circular and that you can hear conversations occurring on the opposite side of  the room, almost perfectly! This is "whisper effect" and circles are prone to this because of the focused reflections that occur in a circle. Take this picture:

The yellow lines represent the reflection patterns of a sound source in this space over a given time (2 seconds, and calculating 3rd order reflections). The "starburst" looking pattern at the top of the circle is the source, this is where the sound is coming from. Do you notice anything odd about these reflections? 

See the "inner circle" that is created by the concentration of yellow lines near the bottom of the image? That means that this area is receiving more reflections than say the middle of the circle...this essentially is what leads to whisper effect!

For some contrast let's look at a square shape:

See the difference? The concentration of reflections is much lighter, so whisper effect doesn't occur.

Obviously the whisper effect could be very problematic for a courtroom so this is the main problem that I must account for, handling the reflections of the circle. 

The First Review!

It snowed in Atlanta today! Had to get that excitement out of the way. Apologies for going a bit without any posts, I have been busy researching lots of information on the history of the courthouse/courtroom and performing lots of acoustic tests on the basic room shapes. All of this was necessary to build up a stronger argument and give a "justifiable" point for doing all of this. I even constructed a digital 3D model of Frank Lloyd Wright's Marin Civic Center courtroom. I performed some rudimentary tests on this courtroom's acoustics.

What I found was very interesting...in a nut shell, the space isn't that bad for speech intelligibility. 

Secondly, my other acoustic tests have proven that the circle may not be so bad after all when compared to a square or other shapes. It's more of dealing with "circle side effects"...more on this later. For now, here is a quick video that I made which summarizes the presentation I gave for my first review yesterday (Feb 8), it went well and I received some great feedback!

Here's the boards: 

And here is the video, enjoy! (Might want to set the quality to HD so it is crisp/clear!)