710 J. Audio Eng. Soc., Vol. 50, No. 9, 2002 September

St. Petersburg, nowonly one year awayfrom celebrating its300th anniversary,

has long been consideredthe crown jewel of Russia.Its many palaces, once thehomes of the Czars and oth-er Russian nobility, nowserve as some of the greatest museums in the world. TheHermitage, most notable of all, symbolizes the art and cul-ture of Russia, and displayed in the five palaces that makeup its galleries are art treasures collected from around theworld during more than 1,000 years. St. Petersburg also isknown throughout the world for its performing arts: theMariinskiy Theatre, the Kirov Ballet, the plays of Pushkin,and the music of Tschaikovsky, Borodin, and Moussorgskyto name but a few.

Now the Audio Engineering Society has raised its flag inPeter the Great’s “window to the West.” The Russian Sec-tions of the AES in Moscow and St. Petersburg, formedless than a decade ago, have blossomed into very active andproductive enclaves of scientists and educators who fordecades before had been sequestered due to Cold War con-straints, unable to communicate with their colleagues in the

West. They have lost notime in catching up, how-ever, and in early June as-sembled an internationalpanel of experts to presentthe AES 21st InternationalConference, ArchitecturalAcoustics and Sound Rein-forcement.

The conference was based at the centrally located HotelMoscow. The technical sessions were held in a grand ball-room refurbished especially for the conference. In fact, theconference commenced immediately after the renovationshad been completed. As an early introduction to the city,delegates who had arrived by Friday evening were taken ona bus tour of some of St. Petersburg’s most famous sites: theChurch on Spilled Blood, St. Isaac’s Cathedral, and theBronze Horseman statue of Peter.

DAY 1Chair Nickolay Ivanov opened the conference Saturdaymorning by explaining that the organizational work hadbeen going on for more than five years. He praised the ded-

Architectural Acoustics and SoundReinforcementJune 1–3, 2002

St. Petersburg, Russia

Clockwise from left: ScientificCommittee Chair Irina Aldoshina,Chair Nickolay Ivanov, and AESPresident Garry Margolis speak atconference opening; AES PastPresident Roy Pritts receives honorarydegree from Professor AlexanderBelooussov of University ofCinematography and Television;Baroque-Koncort Quartet performs.

J. Audio Eng. Soc., Vol. 50, No. 9, 2002 September 711

ication and hard work of his colleagues on the organizingcommittee, especially Scientific Committee Chair Irina Al-doshina and Papers Chair Natalia Tyurina.

Speaking next Irina Aldoshina, a former governor of theAES, praised the renewed vigor of the industrial and re-search organizations within Russia. She told the conferencedelegates how eager her Russian scientific colleagues are toshare ideas and information with the professional audiocommunity worldwide.

AES Past President Roy Pritts received special recogni-tion from the conference committee for his tireless efforts inorganizing the two Russian Sections and then promoting thedevelopment of the 21st Conference. Alexander Be-looussov, rector and president of the University of Cine-matography and Television in St. Petersburg presented himan honorary degree. In his heartfelt acceptance speech Prittssaid, “It’s easy to do good work for such good people.”

An interlude of music by Mozart and Rachmaninoff wasperformed by the Baroque-Koncort, a quartet of flute, twoviolins, and cello, before the first technical session beganwith four invited papers. All of the sessions on Saturdaywere translated simultaneously between English and ➥

712 J. Audio Eng. Soc., Vol. 50, No. 9, 2002 September

Russian by a talented pair of professors from the two techni-cal universities in St. Petersburg. These men not only wereable to keep pace with the technical terms in the papers,they also understood the material and were even able to ex-plain the diagrams to their listeners.

The first invited paper presented a detailed historicaloverview of the development of acoustical science in Rus-sia. Principal author Michael Lannie of the Research Insti-tute for TV and Radio in Moscow explained that there werethree major periods in this history. The first comprised theyears between 1921 and the early 1940s. During this time,considerable research was being done on reverberation timeand the effects of acoustics on performing and recordingspaces. The Research Institute for Television and Radio wasfounded in 1934, and the State House of Sound Recordingand Broadcasting followed shortly thereafter. He noted thatfrom the end of the Russian Civil war until the mid-1940s,however, only 25 studios were constructed in all of Russiaand no new concert halls were built at all. The second peri-

od covered the years from around 1950 until 1991, when theprimary areas of development in Russia were cinema stu-dios; broadcast and recording studios; and new theaters andpublic performance halls. All incorporated contemporarytheoretical and analytical techniques for their design criteria,adopted from work done around the world. The third periodbegan in 1992 and continues to the present. New theoreticalapproaches to acoustics are being developed, many olderconcert halls are being restored or modernized, and newhalls are being built. Lannie’s presentation featured numer-ous photographs of historical and contemporary Russianperformance halls.

The second invited paper was presented by AndrzejCzyzewski, head of the Sound and Vision Engineering De-partment at the Gdansk University of Technology, Gdansk,Poland. His paper, “Some Rules and Methods for Creationof Surround Sound,” explored several signal processingtechniques designed to preserve the acoustical properties ofthe performing space throughout the recording process. He

AES 21st International Conference

Left, author Wolfgang Ahnert answersquestions after presentation. Above, NevilleThiele (left) and Richard Small.

Above, Louis Fielder asksquestion. Top, delegateslisten to presentation.

J. Audio Eng. Soc., Vol. 50, No. 9, 2002 September 713

said that among all of the various techniques examined, onecommon goal was to preserve the impulse response of theroom. Monophonic impulse response tests were made, pri-marily using firecrackers and the human voice as the testsubject, and then convolved to create a spatial impressionfrom an array of loudspeakers. Listening tests then wereconducted to determine which recording techniques tendedto preserve the impression of the original performancespace.

Returning to an historical theme, Konstantin Ershov ofthe St. Petersburg State University of Cinema and Televi-sion presented the next invited paper, outlining the develop-ment of audio equipment and techniques for cinematic pro-duction in Russia. He reflected that it was a majorachievement to convert from silent to sound production dur-ing the 1930s, and that most of the work and equipment nec-essary had been developed in St. Petersburg, then calledLeningrad. Special mobile cinema halls were constructed tobring films to areas of the country that did not have theirown cinema theaters. The mobile units used 16-mm and 35-mm portable projectors and sound systems running on gen-erators. By the late 1930s there were nearly 40 film studiosthroughout the Soviet Union, producing a variety of formatsand levels of quality. There were only a very few large filmstudios, however, and even fewer strictly for music record-ing. By 1956 wide-screen projection and nine-channelsound systems had been installed in some of the country’smore prominent movie theaters, and all of the equipmentwas still being produced exclusively in the Soviet Union. Itwasn’t until 1962 that 70-mm film techniques and modernmultichannel sound systems began to be imported. Begin-ning slowly in the 1970s, and very rapidly in the 1990s, alltypes of equipment and technology from around the worldhave become a part of the Russian cinematic experience.

The final invited paper of this session was presented byRon Streicher of Pacific Audio-Visual Enterprises, Pasade-na, California, and secretary of the AES. The focus of thispaper was a new mid/side boundary microphone currentlyunder development and intended primarily for stereophonicrecording and sound reinforcement of live theatrical andmusical performances. Streicher played several recorded ex-amples made with this microphone and several in compari-son to more conventional techniques. Long an advocate ofthe mid/side microphone technique, he demonstrated thatthe same articulation, clarity, and accuracy of stereophonicimaging for which this technique is well known translatesvery well to a boundary microphone application. Early ex-periments had been done with conventional microphones ar-rayed on the floor of the stage. The recordings played weremade with two prototype units developed in cooperationwith the engineering team at Audio-Technica, U.S.

Session 2 was the first of two on architectural acoustics.Two papers in this session described the design and con-struction of concert halls. Wolfgang Ahnert described theGreat Philharmonic Hall in the Moscow International MusicDome and Jan Voetmann discussed the New SymphonyHall in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria, Spain.

Ahnert, in an invited paper, reviewed the two primary ap-

proaches to the design of performance halls: physical mod-els and computer simulation. Both are essential elements inthe acoustical designer’s toolbox. Physical models, often ata scale of 1:20 are used to evaluate acoustical reflectionsand the results are compared to new computer simulations.Ahnert spoke favorably about the latest version (4.0) of theprogram Ease. Even with advanced simulations, however,physical models will always be needed for proper validationof an acoustical design prior to construction.

In describing the Las Palmas Symphony Hall, Jan Voet-mann explained that the architectural inspiration came ➥

AES 21st International Conference

Invited authors,clockwise from left:Andrzej Czyzewski,Michael Lannie,Konstantin Ershov,Ron Streicher,Thomas Lagö,Marshall Buck, andWolfgang Ahnert.

714 J. Audio Eng. Soc., Vol. 50, No. 9, 2002 September

from the lighthouses on the Grand Canaria Island. Original-ly designed in 1990, the architect died before the hall wasconstructed, so Voetmann and his colleagues were called into complete the project and resolve design anomalies. Theoriginal plan was for a multipurpose shoebox hall, but thereverberation time proved to be too long even for musicalperformances. This was because the entire wall behind theperformers was made of glass to provide the audience apanoramic view of the Atlantic Ocean. The glass producedsome very unpleasant hard reflections toward musicians onthe stage, yet very few early reflections and poor projectionfor the audience. Voetmann’s solution was the design andfabrication of a nearly invisible perforated plastic curtain tocover the window. The curtain significantly reduced the re-flections from the glass without disturbing the audience’sview of the ocean. This, together with additional absorptivematerial on the other interior surfaces, resulted in a reduc-tion of the reverberation time in the empty hall from 3.7 sec-onds to 2.1. Not all the work has been completed, so nomeasurements have yet been taken with an audience pre-sent. Additional side reflectors also are being installed to in-crease the early reflections both on stage and for the audi-ence. Early acoustical tests and computer simulationsindicate that the changes will result in a very pleasant con-

cert experience for all kinds of music, as well as conferencesand other public events.

Next was the first of two sessions on sound reinforce-ment, which featured an invited paper by Marshall Buck,consultant to Gibson Labs, Redondo Beach, California, andtreasurer of the AES. In his presentation, “Dual Range Hornwith Acoustic Crossover,” he discussed the problems asso-ciated with attempting to utilize horn-loaded loudspeakersover a broad frequency range. Several attempts have beenmade to produce a coaxial system, but these have resulted inhigh-frequency shadows, significant delays between themid- and high-frequency drivers, and very uneven off-axisresponse. Buck developed a new configuration for a dual-horn that minimizes these problems by achieving nearly per-fect symmetry between the HF and MF drivers. This resultsin no crossover dip, and both the horizontal and vertical pro-jection patterns are quite even over the entire bandpass. Hestated that these same techniques could be incorporated intothe design of a quad horn with two each mid- and high-fre-quency drivers.

In the evening conference delegates strolled from the Ho-tel Moscow to a nearby dock on the Neva River, where theyboarded a dinner boat for a pleasant cruise. The brilliant,late evening sunlight illuminated the spectacular St. Peters-

AES 21st International Conference

Clockwise from right: Facilities ChairValery Brevdo; Conference Treasurer

Lyudmila Drozdova and translatorNatalia Kurochkina, wearing scarves;

assistant Yulia Lebedeva checksregistration on computer while Papers

Chair Natalia Tyurina and AES ExecutiveDirector Roger Furness assist author

Alfonso Ortega; offering assistance atregistration desk are, from left, Lyudmila

Drozdova, Marina Drobakha, and Lubov Minina.

J. Audio Eng. Soc., Vol. 50, No. 9, 2002 September 715

burg sites along the Neva—Smolnyy Convent, Peter andPaul Fortress, the Hermitage, and the Naval Museum andRostral Columns on Vasilevskiy Island—while cruising tothe Palace Bridge (Dvortsovyy most). The leisurely voyageprovided a wonderful opportunity for conversation in an in-formal and peaceful setting.

DAY 2Sunday began with the second session on sound reinforce-ment. There was no simultaneous translation and all paperswere presented in English. Among the papers presented in thissession was the seventh invited paper of the conference,“Loudspeaker Placement for Enhanced Monitor Sound Fieldand Increased Performer Source Positioning” by Thomas Lagöfrom Jönköping University in Sweden. Lagö described a sys-tem being tested in a church in Bankeryd, Sweden, using aloudspeaker arrangement on the podium wall behind the per-formers. According to Lagö such a system offers numerousadvantages: better first sound wave creation, resulting in betterlocalization for listeners; an opportunity to use the Haas effectfor the complete concert hall; an automatic monitoring systemwith fixed sound levels for ease of use; and better artist micro-phone handling.

To accommodate the large volume of papers, there were

poster sessions during the coffee breaks on Sunday whereauthors discussed their work informally with the delegates.

Room auralization was the focus of the next session,which began with a paper by Diemer de Vries of the DelftUniversity of Technology in The Netherlands. He describeda joint study with Fraunhofer Institute done in a church inWeimar, Germany. A special circular array of microphoneswas used to measure impulse response; then the originalsoundfield of the recording environment was reconstructedutilizing an array of loudspeakers spaced widely enough sothat a listener could walk around in a true sonic space. Thiswas an application of the recording and rendering systemdescribed in the Carrouso Project.

In another concession to the large number of high-qualitypapers, parallel papers sessions were scheduled on Sundayafternoon: Psychoacoustics opposite Transducers, followedby Binaural and Transaural Stereophony opposite WaveField Synthesis.

AES 21st International Conference

AES representatives from left, Secretary Ron Streicher,President Garry Margolis, and Peter Swarte, chair of nextyear’s 114th Convention in Amsterdam.

Author Shakir Vakhitov reviews his posterpresentation, “Nonlinear Model of CondenserMicrophone Capsule,” with Isabelle Schmich.

Author Jin Yong Jeondiscusses his poster

presentation,“Measurements of theScattering Coefficient

of Surfaces in aReverberation Room,”

with John Basset.

From left, Natalia Tyurina, Irina Aldoshina, and RogerFurness review scheduled events.

➥

716 J. Audio Eng. Soc., Vol. 50, No. 9, 2002 September

PALACE BANQUETSunday evening was the social highlight of the conference,when delegates were treated to a regal banquet and enter-tainment at the Beloselskiy-Belozerskiy Palace. Getting offthe buses on Nevskiy Prospekt at the Anichkov Bridge overthe Fontanka Canal, delegates found themselves in front ofa massive building covered in green scaffolding; they werenot sure they were at the correct location. Like many build-ings throughout St. Petersburg, the exterior of the palace isundergoing renovations before the city’s tricentennial cele-brations next year. The interior of the palace has alreadybeen completely restored to its original beauty. Once in-side, three ladies in imperial-period dress escorted the visi-tors up a grand gold staircase, covered with red velvet car-peting, to the second tier where a large mirrored room hadbeen prepared with tables and glasses of Russian vodka andchampagne. Music filled the room, provided by a trio offlute, violin, and cello.

Following the champagne reception, the guests were tak-en in smaller groups through the several rooms of the waxmuseum which now occupies sections of the palace. These

exhibits trace the history of Russia and its rulers from theearly Czarist period, through the Russian Revolution and theSoviet years, to the present day. The guides for this tourwere very articulate and knowledgeable and provided guestswith a thorough explanation of the personalities and con-flicts of Russian history.

A magnificent Russian banquet followed, with severalcourses of meats, vegetables, fish, and desserts served bycostumed waiters in an elegant dining hall. During the ban-quet special recognition was given to Marianna Sankiewicz,former AES Europe Central Region vice president, forefforts that laid the groundwork for the conference. Afterthe banquet delegates assumed the evening was over, but theconference committee had a final surprise. Guests were es-corted to another extravagant grand ballroom, where cos-tumed dancers took most of the guests for a waltz on thedance floor. Although many of the golden-eared delegateshave two left feet, everyone found the dancing exhilarating.

DAY 3On the final day of the conference the first of two sessions,Architectural Acoustics, Part 2, offered several more casestudies of halls under development or in the process ofrestoration or improvement. The most unusual of these waspresented by Maria Ribeiro of Porto, Portugal. She was inthe midst of a project to convert a multipurpose cinema the-

AES 21st International Conference

Counterclockwise from top left: guests enter ornate Beloselskiy-Belozerskiy Palace; tour of wax museum depicting Russianhistory; banquet of Russian delicacies and wines; ConferenceChair Nickolay Ivanov thanks Marianna Sankiewicz, former AESEurope Central Region vice president, for efforts that laidgroundwork for St. Petersburg conference.

J. Audio Eng. Soc., Vol. 50, No. 9, 2002 September 717

ater into a music perfor-mance hall while maintain-ing its ability to serve as acinema theater. She accepted this challenge despite beinggiven a very tight budget. She was further restricted by theexisting architectural features of the building and the factthat there was considerable noise from the heating andcooling system. Delegates commented that such challengesare all too common to everyone in the field. This sessionbrought out the best collaborative instincts of the delegates,as several of the veteran acoustical consultants and design-ers offered her assistance in facing what all in the roomagreed to be a fairly insurmountable task. This session trulybecame a community of colleagues and friends, and that iswhat the Audio Engineering Society really is about.

The final session of the conference was Linear and Non-linear Signal Processing Techniques. Mark Avis of the Uni-versity of Salford, Greater Manchester, UK, presented “Q-Factor Modification for Low-Frequency Room Modes.” Hediscussed a method for deriving a simple central filter tocorrect low-frequency, spatial, and temporal problems in lis-tening rooms. He stated that the total soundfield of a roomcan be considered as the sum of all modal responses in theroom and that by appropriate manipulation the user can setthe soundfield to match a defined set of criteria.

At the conference closing Nickolay Ivanov and Irina Al-

doshina expressed their gratitude to the more than 100 dele-gates from 22 countries who attended and to the authors ofthe 58 papers. The final remarks were given by AES Presi-dent Garry Margolis who thanked the conference organizersfor their many months of hard work in preparing the firstAES conference in the former Soviet Union.

Many delegates were able to schedule extra time beforeor after the conference to visit St. Petersburg’s great muse-ums, its grand churches, and its famous music and dancevenues. Two technical tours gave delegates an up-closelook at the Ice Palace, the most modern concert venue inRussia, and the Old Musical Instruments Museum at theCount Scheremetev Palace. Numerous delegates praised theopportunity to meet and exchange ideas with talented Rus-sian colleagues who were isolated from the global audiocommunity during the Cold War years. All who attendedundoubtedly hope that they can return another time to thecity that Peter founded almost 300 years ago.

A CD-ROM and a printed version of The Proceedings of the AES21st International Conference are available for order onwww.aes.org, or from any AES office.

AES 21st International Conference

Clockwise from above: “Zazdorovie (To health),” from left,Jan Voetmann, Thomas Lagö,

Arkady Gloukhov, and DavidScheirman offer toast; trio offlute, violin, and cello providemusic; after banquet Russian

dancers waltzed withdelegates.