Design of a new auditorium using electroacoustic technology

In recent years, pops, jazz and rock'n'roll concerts have often been presented at many auditoriums, and musical programs performed have the tendency of using mainly electric musical instruments such as electric bass, electric guitar, electric piano, and music synthesizer. Accordingly, the sound reinforcement system design becomes as more important to improve the PA sound mixing and the design of room acoustics for the auditorium. This paper describes the example of the electroacoustic systems for the World Popular Song Festival in Tokyo at the Nippon Budokan Hall with 100 000 m³ and explains the idea of design using electroacoustic technology for the Exhibition Hall. In view of the control of sound field for the Exhibition Hall, new tools have been adopted such as (1) the movable proscenium loudspeaker, (2) movable sound absorbing canvas, (3) artificial reverberation adding system, (4) multichannel public address console and delay/reverberation control console, and (5) other various types of electrical and spatial reverberation adding devices.