Acoustical design of the GRIEG MEMORIAL HALL in Bergen.

 

Svein Strøm 

47 976 59 831
E-post :
sst@cowi.no
COWI AS
Otto Nielsens vei 12
7414 Trondheim
                                                                             

 

 

The Grieg Memorial Hall in Bergen, finished in 1978, is a multi-purpose hall primarily intended for concerts. To cater for other uses, it is equipped with a large stage and constructed in such a way that it can be converted to serve for theatre, opera, ballet, shows and congresses. Even sport arrangements have used the hall.  The shape of the hall was designed  using 3-D sound ray tracing in a mathematical modell of the room. The design had to be unconven-tional since all the concrete constructions had been finished when this investigation started. Measurement data of pulse response, reverberation time and speech  intelligibility  will be presented. Musicians, conductors and audience members have reported their impressions as : "satisfactory fullness  of tone and spatial impression, but at the same time a distinct sound".  The most important         experience from this project was that we succeeded in designing a satisfactory concert hall acoustics, using our newly developed computer technique.  With these computer data we managed to convince the building committee and the architect  that  the redesign of  the hall could give a satisfactory sound            distribution.