| Acting Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) Professor Lee Astheimer (cen... Acting Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) Professor Lee Astheimer (centre) in the anechoic chamber which she officially opened along with (from left) Dr Christian Ritz (Informatics), Professor Diana Wood Conroy (Creative Arts), Professor Andrew Schultz (Creative Arts Dean)and David Wilson (Informatics) |
Official opening of UOW’s first anechoic chamber
23 May 2008 | Bernie Goldie
The Faculties of Creative Arts, Health and Behavioural Sciences and Informatics recently conducted the official opening of the UOW anechoic chamber – a chamber likened to a “cone of silence”.
The Acting Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research), Professor Lee Astheimer, performed the official opening of the new chamber located in the Faculty of Creative Arts.
The development of the chamber was made possible through the 2007 Federal Government Research Infrastructure Block Grants (RIBG) scheme and a contribution from UOW’s Sonic Arts Research Network (SARN) and the Telecommunications and Information Technology Research (TITR) Institute.
The anechoic chamber provides a new home for the Configurable Hemispheric Environment for Spatialised Sound (CHESS), which is a sound facility created in 2001 as a collaborative project between the researchers from Informatics led by Associate Professor Ian Burnett and staff in the sound, composition, music and production program from Creative Arts led by Associate Professor Stephen Ingham. CHESS has been the principal infrastructure used for cross-disciplinary research activities in spatial or 3D sound.
Last year, a team from the Faculties of Informatics, Creative Arts and Health and Behavioural Sciences led by Dr Christian Ritz from Informatics was awarded an RIBG to build the University’s first anechoic chamber.
So what is an anechoic chamber? Normally, when you hear sounds they are reflected from the walls and other hard surfaces. This is most noticeable in a large room (like a concert hall), where you can hear the reverberant effects of the room acoustics. In an anechoic chamber, if you make a sound there will be no echoes and you get the pure sound.
For example, if you speak loudly, sound will travel away from you but will never reflect back from the wall. These rooms are also very quiet as sounds cannot penetrate the walls, floor or ceiling. In some ways, Dr Ritz said that an anechoic chamber is like a “cone of silence” popularised in the old TV series Get Smart – only you can hear the sound and no-one else can.
Why are anechoic chambers useful? They provide a place for recording and listening to sounds without echoes or unwanted outside noise.
This will enable a wealth of new research and creative activities previously not possible with the original CHESS facility, according to Dr Ritz.
Researchers from the Faculty of Informatics are investigating how people perceive and isolate sound sources. This has application to new digital audio compression technology for compressing 5.1 surround sound to file sizes that are comparable to those used for storing stereo audio, such as used on an iPOD.
It also has application to new techniques for playing 3D audio, where loudspeakers are used to create the effect of sound coming from all directions – not just around you (as in surround sound) but also above you.
“For example, imagine watching a movie scene where the sound of water falling on a tin roof above your head is perfectly recreated,” Dr Ritz said.
For researchers from the Faculty of Creative Arts involved in sound composition, the chamber can be used to investigate how listeners would perceive new forms of music.
In particular, researchers are looking at new forms of microtonal music, which uses a different tuning system to conventional western music of 12 notes per octave.
As well as new forms of music, the chamber can also be used to understand how a theatre (such as the Hellenistic theatre in Paphos, Cyprus) might have sounded to audience members in ancient times. The anechoic chamber will allow the effects of different material surfaces on the acoustic properties of sound to be studied in a controlled environment.
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