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  • Empty Halls

    A
    A

    It sounds like the IRs were taken when the halls were empty. 

    Of course this is much easier to record IRs empty than with an audience there.

    But empty halls sound very different than halls full of people.  Mostly when we listen to a performance in a hall, there is an audience.  The times when I've been at a performance and the hall is nearly empty, it doesn't work very well.  The sound is much more reverberent and tinny.

    I'm struggling to get sounds I like from the reverbs, and I wonder if the emptiness of the hall is a large factor.

    Has there been any thought to modeling an audience?
  • DietzD
    VSL Team
    DietzD

    Hi Adrien,

    I assume you are talking about MIR Pro, aren't you?

    You're absolutely right: We record impulse responses for MIR Pro's Venues in empty halls. It wouldn't be easy to find up to 1,600 people sitting completely motionless and silent for 24 hours or more, listening to loud sine sweeps all the time, just to fill the audience area of Vienna Konzerthaus - Great Hall or Sage Gateshead - Hall One, that's true. :-) And even then, any Venue license would cost at least ten times what it does now.  >8-0

    But the good news is that good concert halls take this problem into account by padding the underside of their unused chairs with sound-absorbing materials, so the effect is much less obvious than you might think*). The acoustics of churches and the like will not change noticeably with or without people in them anyway. And in the case of studios and scoring stages, you wouldn't expect many people to be present during a recording session anyway.

    You can still easily imitate the most noticeable sound-absorbing impact of the audience by reducing the reverb length a bit; you can also dampen the high end of the wet signal a notch with MIR Pro's RoomEQ.

    If you are aiming for a completely different sound impression without losing the sense of depth of a selected Venue, try a hybrid approach by adding algorithmic reverb to MIR's Wet signal (or even more drastically: by replacing the actual reverb tail altogether and keeping only the first 300-500ms of the IRs). 

    *) Apart from that: I know conductors and record producers who prefer to hear the sound of certain halls empty than filled with people. 8-)

    HTH,

    /Dietz - Vienna Symphonic Library