A Tale of Tennis Court Acoustics

A Tale of Tennis Court Acoustics

As a concertizing symphonic wind ensemble, the Queensland Wind Orchestra primarily focuses its musical attentions upon its annual curated concert season - performing a lot of new symphonic wind music - at the Old Museum in Brisbane. However, as a community musical organization, we also regularly perform “band classics and movie music” in the Brisbane Bands in Parks concert series. These performances - as well as dawn ANZAC Day memorial services - take place “in the “wild” in the out-of-doors under varying natural conditions. The band has fun with these gigs - even dressing in silly costumes for kids’ concerts – as a long-standing band tradition and enjoyable public service. Our most recent performance in the Band in Parks project was a full concert - ninety minutes of music - in a new venue at the Queensland Tennis Centre in Brisbane. A large covered tennis arena (as it turned out) with adjacent to café amenities and a grassy area where a lot of people could enjoy an outdoor evening concert.

Just walking onto the tennis court told us that we were going to be encountering an extreme acoustical situation in performing on this outdoor tennis arena. Also discovering that we were to play on the back side of the court six – eight meters away from the front row of the audience (see images). Of course, it seemed like a good idea at the time for the organizers to put the protective floor coverings on the far side of the court away from the audience. But it also seems that no one listened to the ambient acoustical sound inside the tennis court arena in the process. Because the reflective nature and consequence was an acoustical echo: Ta... ta... ta... ta... ta ... with Big Resonance ... Just what you would like to hear when tennis balls were getting smashed PONK - PONK as striving elite players GRUNT GRUNT.

This was how the stage sounded, from where we were sitting, below the ceiling on the back half of the tennis court – loud, quick, short, repetitive acoustic resonance - but out in the foyer and grass picnic areas, where the audience was situated, our ensemble presence was (just) a very BIG SOUND. The capacity audience loved having a very unusual musical experience and consequently giving the band a standing ovation and wanting an encore ... 

Nevertheless, playing music under this dome-echo-plex was a conundrum. Our musical director and conductor David Law asked us to play through a couple of tougher rhythmic spots in order to hear-adjust to what we perceived was happening ... Then launched into the concert featuring both Holst Eb & F Suites for Military Band and Percy Grainger with movie music by John Williams, Hans Zimmer and of course James Bond. Two 45-minute sets of music which were adaptively and expressively performed.

In my subjective observation-opinion of what took place - within this extreme performance environment – was that the players intuitively “banded” together. Forming a concentrated gestalt trance where we focused visually upon the conductor (who is exceptionally clear - conducting from memory – as a preference) while also selectively ignoring the distracting “echo effects”. Attending strictly to the sound that we were individually producing with how that “core sound” fit within the musical ensemble ... A hyper-gestalt musical presence affecting an "acoustic bubble" to play within ... In that ‘bubble’ we could then also play with the acoustics in creating massive (from a “bass materiality” POV) sub-woofer acoustical effects while creating crescendos, chords and musical resolutions within such an acoustically "hard" reverberation.

This was my idiosyncratic impression of our impressive performance adoption under a covered tennis court venue. At the intermission it was obvious in walking out onto the front vacant half of the tennis court, separating the band from the audience, that this was the space in which we should have been set-up in to avoid our confusing acoustic conditions. A good thing to know before playing another time at what is otherwise a fine venue. Curious, as to what was happening in the pragmatic world of acoustical physics under such circumstances, I contacted a trusted musical associate Edward McCue in Denver Colorado. Ed is a former acoustical engineer whose profession was designing and building music schools and concert halls. A career that brought him to Australia over twenty years ago to oversee the Sydney Conservatorium and the Verbrugghen Concert Hall renovations at the Old Government House stables; also creating an opportunity to happily renew our friendship following my immigration to Australia. Here is part of his interesting reply to the non-ordinary acoustical situation that the QWO encountered in performance:

 Jim! Although I’m horrified by the photos and your description, I can imagine that it was a fantastic experience. Under these circumstances the performers were correctly placed below the most-projecting portion of the ceiling, but in an unforgiving geometry like this, it was unfortunate that the floor in front of the musicians was left sound-reflecting. Without a sound absorbing audience on that portion of the floor, the ceiling above and just beyond the performers was free to "talk" to the hard floor, and in reply the floor happily sent that energy right back to the ceiling (and on and on) until sound reflected off of the ceiling finally encountered some nice "fuzzy" listeners instead of the floor.

So, while this is an appreciated technical evaluation of the situation - with some detailed suggestions for corrections not included here –an accomplished musicianship employing a highly developed ‘focused attention’ by the ensemble were able to address the problem without a discussion of “How to do it?”. A deeply concentrated selective listening was our superpower, on this day, in this context. Instinctively employing a normally autonomic sensory function of human hearing and consciousness to actively block and ignore any extraneous sounds in our environment as we focus exclusively on what it/is we want to hear. We could still “hear” the echo but without actively listening to it could better concentrate on the music we intended to produce. Individually, and as a musical ensemble, we were capable of ignoring the distracting and confusing reverberations to fully concentrate to the sounds that we were producing singly and together. Further than this to then actually PLAY within the acoustics and provide ourselves and the audience with a uniquely sonorous musical experience.