Calm in a Sea of Sound Waves
Originally published in Schweizer Musikzeitung
Written by Pia Schwab
Featuring Jürgen Strauss and SE MUSICLAB
Focus — No. 7/8, July/August 2022
At the end of May, SE MUSICLAB was inaugurated in Wabern near Bern. In a rare combination of naturalness and state-of-the-art technology, everything is oriented toward concentrated listening.
This “island” is entered by way of a special landing stage. Jürgen Strauss, the “lord of the island,” who conceived and initiated the entire facility, explains that the covered, gently rising, curved entrance involves a bit of “architectural-acoustic drama.”
“Before entering the Lab, you stand in the large hall, seven meters high, with pronounced reverberation. When you walk into the corridor, that acoustic impression of space disappears after a few steps. There is a point where you feel as though you hear nothing at all. Inside, it becomes slightly reverberant again; there is a relaxed calm. Visually, too, it is a journey: you come out of bright daylight, through darkness, into a softly lit space.”
In this way, the emotional perception of the space also changes. The interior of the MUSICLAB recalls an igloo or a yurt — a white dome with a dark floor that does not touch the walls. It appears to float.
The entrance calls to mind an entry into the underworld. Yet one does not enter an afterlife where the laws of nature no longer apply. Rather, their effects are directed here with complete consistency toward a single goal.
“This place is designed so that there is as little as possible to distract you from concentrating on listening, on sound images,” Strauss emphasizes.
“When we introduce light, it is white light with a very slight yellow tint. That is perceived as neutral. With reddish light, one would tend to feel that the sound image is warm; with bluish light, that it is bright and cool.”
The parquet floor “floats” because the main bass absorber is located beneath it, capturing low frequencies. The entrance construction also ensures that, even before the door — always the weakest point in terms of isolation — there is already quiet. Incidentally, it has exactly the dimensions required for a Steinway D to pass through.
Directly Into the Ear
An island for the ears, then. And what is offered to the ears here is intended to correspond directly and unaltered to what comes from the loudspeakers of the integrated three-dimensional sound reinforcement system — a 24.5 system.
The room, which normally strongly influences our listening impressions, is intended to interfere acoustically as little as possible. For this purpose, loudspeakers were built that radiate sound broadly in the horizontal plane, but focus it vertically. This means floor and ceiling reflections are only minimally excited.
In addition, with a reverberation time of 0.3 seconds, the acoustics are extremely “dry.”
Strauss puts it technically:
“The reference is the form of the electrical signal, as it comes from the mixing console, the CD player, or the digital-to-analog converters. It should be converted as exactly as possible, proportionally, into a sound wave. That is our objective. It does not succeed perfectly — perfection is reserved for heaven — but we try to approach it.”
Seclusion Through Mass
On a lonely island far out in the quiet Pacific, this sound system could show its qualities under optimal conditions. But the MUSICLAB is located in Wabern near Bern. How does one create Pacific calm in a residential and commercial area, directly beside a railway line?
“That is difficult to achieve and only works if the inner room is completely decoupled from the outer space.”
This is made possible through mass. And here, that mass has a spectacular form: a clay wall running around the dome, reminiscent of a rough wool carpet — and of traditional clay architecture in Mali, Yemen, or Iran.
Strauss has long worked with the Chair of Architecture and Digital Fabrication, Gramazio & Kohler, at ETH Zurich. From this collaboration came the world’s first robot-fabricated clay wall. A robot compressed 32,000 clay cylinders, each around 10 centimeters in diameter and 20 centimeters long, with 200 kilograms of pressure, placing each one in a precisely calculated position.
The material had to be wet, but not too wet, otherwise the wall would have collapsed. In traditional construction, a five-meter-high clay wall requires a base thickness of 1.2 meters. Although the hall is solidly built — beer was once bottled here — its floor would not have supported that load.
The wall was therefore shaped so that it supports itself. Its base line moves in a gentle wave pattern and narrows upward into a simple circle, with a consistent wall thickness of 20 centimeters.
“The construction process was extremely delicate,” Strauss confirms. “When it was finished, the structure weighed 72 tons. It then sweated out 12 tons within three months and shrank accordingly. That is very atypical, and it is thanks to the skill and engineering knowledge of everyone involved that the wall truly stands today. It is actually a project of applied research, because from the beginning it was not clear whether such a high wall, self-supporting and without any reinforcement, could be built.”
Because the clay mantle is built on a spring system, the MUSICLAB remains still at vibrations above 8 Hertz — far below the range audible to humans — “like an oil tanker on a calm sea; it no longer moves at all.”
Inside the wall, and completely decoupled from it, 40 tons of wood were also used for the dome.
Future Sounds and Lost Rooms
Who will land on this island, and with what kinds of projects?
Strauss sees a wide range of applications: from psychoacoustic studies on the effects of sound, to optimizing soundtracks for films or games, to product development, for example audio amplifiers. Courses on questions of room acoustics are also planned, potentially in cooperation with musicology.
“As a rule, one has scores and assumes that this is the core of the musical event. But compared with a performance, that is extremely abstract.”
Today, simulation programs can already calculate the acoustic properties of a future room based on three-dimensional architectural plans. With this process, known as auralization, Strauss is also pursuing the project of bringing Haydn’s music back to life as it must have sounded in the opera house of Esterházy.
Musicians and recording engineers of all disciplines can analyze and shape their recordings in detail in the Musiclab. Recordings are also possible — the Steinway fits inside, after all — and, in keeping with the dry acoustics, would be defined by direct sound. For selected purposes this is desirable, though playing in such an environment takes some getting used to.
But anchored in front of the island is another “ship”: the factory hall houses a second structure. From the outside, it is a tall, angular, black body; inside, a room with a great deal of wood, linen, and sails — a recording studio.
It offers space for ensembles up to a septet or octet. Around the room, absorbers in the wooden cladding can be opened or closed, and fabric blinds above can be “set” to varying degrees. This makes the reverberation time variable, from around 1.2 to 0.5 seconds.
“That is an enormous musical range. One can also change the tone colors and spatial impression extremely. On recordings, the room sounds larger than it appears visually.”
Naturally, sounds played in the studio can be heard immediately through the sound system in the Lab. The two rooms, which have already received the nicknames Timbuktu and Mecca, form a unique combination.
The Love of Eye and Ear
Both structures combine technology with aesthetics.
“A laboratory operation is meant to take place here, but within an architecturally coherent setting — not with arbitrary amounts of cables everywhere. The whole thing should also be attractive as an event location.”
That is why Strauss favored the clay wall, even though a brick or concrete structure would also have fulfilled the purpose and would have cost less.
He says, laughing, that he wanted to build nothing less than a Pantheon for acoustics. But this is not just an offhand remark.
He tells the story of Narcissus and Echo: the youth Narcissus hears Echo’s voice when he himself speaks; he falls in love with her, but cannot see her. The nymph Echo sees Narcissus, but cannot speak to him. And because she is hidden in a rock face, the two never come together.
Listening to Strauss tell the story, one can well imagine that, secretly, he is also working here to help the failed love between eye and ear find its happiness after all.
