Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: dining vs. performances: shared or separate spaces?

[Howard Landman (howard]

> Has anyone had any experience with trying to use the same room for
> both dining and for musical performances?

Yes, at River Rock we've had both many meals and several different
kinds of performances (acoustic music, poetry reading, live electric
band, dances with DJ spinning CDs) in our main common house room.

> The acoustical needs are
> somewhat mutually exclusive: in a dining room you want to dampen and
> absorb as much sound as possible, whereas a performance space wants
> much livelier acoustics, ideally with a few seconds of reverberation.

In most cases I'd disagree with this.  For a band to control its
sound, it's easiest if they can just tweak their own reverb unit
or whatever.  The only time room reverb is preferable is when you have
a pure unamplified acoustic source with no way to process it.  (Or
when you have a room with such extraordinary acoustics that they
become part of the experience, like a cathedral or the Taj Mahal.)
I've had a very hard time getting any kind of clean bass in our
common house because it's too echoey even after the ceilings had
spray-on bumps added (at additional unanticipated cost to us).

> Has anyone been successful in adding or removing acoustical elements
> (carpet, hangings, room dividers, etc.) to make one space work well
> for both purposes?

It's usually easiest to do this with walls - floors and ceilings are
more difficult.  But in a large space, you'll need a lot of material.

If you have a long room with a preferred "front" where the performers
will usually be, then the single most important thing is to deaden the
wall at the opposite end (the "back").  Otherwise you tend to get
annoying "slapback" echoes off the back wall that muddy the sound
considerably.  It's not as vital to deaden the "front" wall because
the delay of its echo is much shorter and the sound-producing elements
won't usually be pointed right at it.

        Howard Landman
        (sometimes poet, guitarist, singer, & DJ)