S.B. from Manchester
It has often happened in the past that public buildings of the most elegant architecture and noble proportions have turned out when built to be almost entirely useless for their purpose on account of faulty acoustics. Probably half the Town Halls in the country have the property of conveying a speaker's voice straight up to the rafters and flinging it back in a complicated pattern of echoes that completely baffle the attentive ear. Nowadays, acoustics is becoming an important branch of architecture, and Principal Sutherland, who is to talk this evening, is one of its leading authorities. He is a member of the Privy Council Advisory Committee on Architectural Acoustics, and he was partly responsible for the new Friends' Meeting House in London, one of the most successful of modern buildings from the point of view of sound.