An Acoustic Analysis of the Englert Theater

An Acoustic Analysis of the Englert Theater
Austin Wu
Kale Brown
David Pike
Zach Kester
Blank Map
The seats at the Englert were divided into 47 sections, with 9 in the
balcony and 38 on the floor (Sections 31, 36, and 37 do not have
seats). The heat map and raw data
were recorded for each section.
How to Read the Heat Map:
Sound quality is better in green
sections and worse in red sectionsin short, red is bad, green is better,
and yellow is somewhere in the
middle.
As one looks through the data results we have gathered they may
find that there are quite a few
strange things that they may see.
One of the strange things they may
see is that on one side of a row the
sound quality may be great and the
other side could have bad sound
quality. A reason for this could be
that the waves are meeting in that
spot to make a ‘hot spot’. These ‘hot
spots’ can happen within a couple
feet of spots that have good sound
quality. This could be because of
the shape of the room or the materials the space is made of.
History and Architecture
When the Englert was first completed in 1912, the theatre had box seating on the
side walls and lacked a central aisle, and much of the materials used in the construction of the building were wood, plaster, and other ‘soft’ insulating materials.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the building
was converted to a two-screen movie theater, with the auditorium being
split in two across the central aisle,
and the building’s interior was ‘modernized’ with gypsum board, paneling,
and carpeting, continuing a trend of
decorating the Englert with materials
that had relatively poor reverberation.
While the dividing wall was knocked
down in the 1990s, the effects of it still
remain. It is here that a possible explanation for the discrepancies between
the right and left hand sides of the
auditorium can be made- a difference
between the building materials used
when the Englert was a movie theater
has not been rectified, and as a result,
creates different acoustic qualities on
opposite sides of the theater.
The Englert served as a vaudeville theater from about 1912-1926 when the
building caught on fire, and was subsequently rebuilt with the same kinds of
materials used in its initial construction. The Englert was then converted
into a movie theater, and had its ornate
1920s decor replaced with gypsum
board, paneling, carpeting, and acoustic ceilings, and remained in continuous operation until its closure in 1999.
The theater was put up for sale the same
year and purchased with the intentions
of becoming a nightclub. Many members of the community did not want
the the theater to close, so started a
campaign called “Save the Englert”. The
campaign succeeded in 2004 and the
Englert was restored and renovated
once again as a stage theater.
Good/Bad Seat Examples:
The image above is an example of a good seat (floor section 1). The reasoning behind this is because the sound
quality in the range that human ears is fairly flat and not extremely far off from the sample tone (0.0 on the
x-axis). The closer the extracted data is to the test tone, the better the sound is.
The image above is an example of a bad seat (balcony section 8). The reasoning behind this is because the frequencys are so far away from the sample tone that they start to become difficult to read, or muddy sounding.
Works Cited
1918 Iowa City High School Yearbook. Iowa City: Iowa City High School, 1918. Print.
“Iowa City Theatre -The Englert Mission.” Our History. The Englert Theatre, n.d. Web. 16 Feb. 2015.
“National Register of Historical Places - IOWA (IA), Johnson County.” National Register of Historical Places IOWA (IA), Johnson County. National Register of Historical Places - IOWA (IA), Johnson County, n.d. Web.
16 Feb. 2015.