REAL LIFE NEWS: SUPER-ACOUSTICS OF GREEK AMPHITHEATRE TURN OUT TO BE A MYTH
by Hazed
If you visit the ancient Greek amphitheatre in Edpidaurus, tour guides will tell you that the amazing acoustics of the theatre mean you can hear a pin drop in every seat. It’s been held up as an impressive feat by ancient architects. But it turns out that it is a myth. (A mythconception, maybe?)
The theatre was built in the fourth century BC, and it seats up to 14,000 spectators – each of which was supposed to be able to hear perfectly what was happening on stage, even a whisper.
So researchers from the Eindhoven University of Technology decided to test this. Assistant Professor Constant Hak had visited Epidaurus many years ago, and failed to hear anything special about the famous acoustics. So he was curious about what was going on.
His team used 20 microphones, placed at 12 different locations around the amphitheatre, and two loudspeakers, one centre stage and the other to the side. The speakers played, with a slight delay between them, a sound that ranged from low to high frequency, with the speakers in five different orientations.
This resulted in a total of around 2,400 recordings, which were analysed to calculate the sound strength at different points in the theatre.
Back in the lab, they made recordings of various sounds, such as a coin being dropped, paper tearing and a person whispering. They played these to participants who adjusted the loudness of the sounds until they could be heard over background noise. The results were then fed into the team’s calculations, which revealed how far from the stage the sounds would be heard.
The results showed that a coin drop or paper tear would only be recognisable up to halfway back from the stage, and a whisper would only be intelligible to those in the front seats.
The only way for actors to be heard in the furthest seats would be for an actor to speak loudly and clearly, which of course actors are trained to do.
The conclusion is that the ancient Greek’s didn’t have some mysterious science of acoustics which has since been lost.
But wait – there is a dissenting voice: Armand D’Angour, an associate professor of classics at the University of Oxford. He says that the research doesn’t necessarily show how the acoustics would have worked in the past. “The research is based on theatre that has changed over the centuries, so it looks terribly precise and mathematical but in the end, we cannot be at all confident that the way it sounds today exactly replicates the way it would have sounded then,” he said, adding that research has suggested that the Greeks might have used all manner of devices to amplify sound, including placing hollow vessels at strategic locations.
Short of using a time machine, there’s no way to prove that one way or the other. So I guess we’ll never know for sure.
