Holiday Sounds

When you know it’s not just the daily grind.

How do you know when your career is more than just a salary? When your interest in what you do is real? Can we suggest one measure of this is how much your holidays and career become one. For acousticians, this might be when you remain in a space longer than your family or friends would like! It could be a theatre, a cave, a roof top garden etc.; something catches your ear and off you roam to investigate leaving others waiting.

Holidays allow you to forget the numbers that spread often like a virus in our profession, and can return us to the end point – the sound around you and what this means to you and others. They also allow you to be impressed by how acoustic situations may have arisen, and the effects and solutions both natural and man-made that come from this.

Such was the case for one of our team in 2024 visiting the 50 hectare park of the Deutsch-Franzosischer Garten in Saarbrucken in Germany, opened in 1960 which crosses into France on the ‘Goldene Bremm’ border. Here open-air music festivals and concerts occur in the gardens. The permanent rigid concert shell is a great example of fundamental acoustic design principles to provide vocal and music projection and diffusion to a free field landscape. Its inherent self-amplification to an audience can be experienced by walking across the space whilst talking or singing.

So, when next on holiday, take the time to stop a little longer, and hear what you are visiting, as for acousticians this can be extra special.