I interviewed Tim Gulsrud who is a practicing acoustician. This means he consults architectural firms in how to design buildings to best suit the acoustic needs of the client. During our conversation while talking about using physics to understand how the sound is interacting with the physical space he said, “It gets so complicated so fast. It shows you the limitations of the physics. We might say, ‘We’ve got this figured out. We’ve got this reverberation time equation, we’ve got these axial mode calculations, it’s simple math’… But the part of the spectrum where low frequency modes really happen is up to 100 HZ, I might calculate them up to 150 maybe 200 HZ depending on the size of the room, but beyond that it gets so complicated it’s just not worthwhile. The math just breaks down. The engineer might say, well don’t worry, all you have to worry about is up to 200HZ, but as an audio engineer if you said all I have to worry about is up to 200 HZ, that right there shows you the limitations of the math and that’s cutting edge acoustics. It just becomes impractical.” I found this statement interesting as it describes the ways in which science and math can really only take us so far in our understanding of the world around us. At a certain point the tools don’t work and you have to rely on your human experience to make further decisions and analysis. How can I demonstrate the limitations of science and where we must cross into the realm of art?

Another topic we talked in depth about was the exploration of standing waves within a room. There is an experiment which involves placing a speaker at different locations in the room and exciting room modes. “Room modes are the collection of resonances that exist in a room when the room is excited by an acoustic source such as a loudspeaker. Most rooms have their fundamental resonances in the 20 Hz to 200 Hz region, each frequency being related to one or more of the room's dimension's or a divisor thereof”, says Wikepedia. You can experience these room modes by walking around the space during a time that a speaker is exciting one of the modes and at different places in the room you will hear a rise in the volume of sound and then a lowering in the volume. I am wondering what kinds of interesting artistic effects may be explored in the excitation of room modes? What can we explore in the peaks and null points?