Now, if I asked you to close your eyes and picture a typical live room, or music practice room, found within a school in County Durham, what would you expect to see? Whatever it may be, I would suggest with indubitable confidence and lucid certainty that the vision conjured up in your mind’s eye will be little less than one million miles from that of which the music students at Bede Sixth Form College have the pleasure of utilising on a daily basis.
At this stage I feel it necessary to direct your attention to the photo below:
Despite its uncanny resemblance to the sugar based cube found deep within a packet of Bassett’s Dolly Mixture, this stunning example of contemporary architecture is in fact the very place where students gleefully congregate to record songs, practice live music and release their inner maestros.
However, despite the immediately apparent aesthetic nature of the pod, as an environment for live music, the pod was not performing as the College had hoped. The acoustics within the room were ok, but sound transmission (i.e. from inside to outside) was quite frankly appalling. The pod suffered from a considerable amount of vibration and subsequently sent out intrusive sounds across the entire breadth of the frequency range.
The idea of this live pod was to contain the sound produced by the musicians within, thus sustaining peaceful surroundings for all fellow students and teachers despite the level of noise being created within. Sadly, this was not the case.
The pod is set above a private study/relaxation area for students (see photo below), but due to the amount of noise leaking from the pod, students found it very hard to concentrate when attempting to study or indeed relax – thus negating the very purpose of the pod.
As a result of this, we at Amadeus Acoustic Solutions, as distributors to Boxy s.r.l, our Italian partners, proposed to design and install one of our special acoustic modular rooms within the pod in order to alleviate this problem. We had to follow the foot print of the pod, yet create total isolation and the perfect environment for bands to practice and record. Below you will find two drawings which highlight the design and structure of the room we installed into the pod.
The Boxy room was installed in October 2009. To see just how successful the room has been, please see the testimonial below sent to us from Patrick Jordan Lecturer in Music Technology & Media Studies at Bede College:
“We put the new room through its paces today with a full band and everything went excellently. The room was completely sound proof - we were able for the first time to monitor everything through our monitors without them being coloured by spill from the live room; the results were stunning. The acoustics in the room are very flattering to every acoustic instrument that we recorded (including drums, acoustic guitars, mandolins, bass guitar, electric guitar and vocals). I couldn't be more pleased. The Principal visited during the recording session and was very pleased with the results. We also had an impromptu visit from the Chair of Governors who was stunned at the new room and also at the speed at which it had been assembled (he simply could not believe that it had been built from the ground up in just two days). Thank you very much for this room, it does exactly what I hoped it would”. (Patrick Jordan BA(Hons), PGCE, MIfL. Lecturer in Music Technology & Media Studies)
