Conceptual Acoustic Design for a Modern Recording Studio
With everything online anyway, I took the opportunity at the start of the 2021 to enrol myself in Berklee Online’s Architectural, Acoustic and Audio System Design for the Modern Production Studio, offered as part of their Music Production coursework. Being somewhat underwhelmed with Australia’s offerings for furthering acoustic knowledge in an academic framework, this course’s content was certainly aligned with areas I’m interested in. And on completion, I can say it definitely hit all the marks – excellent content, excellent platform and excellent teachers.
Guided by the legendary John Storyk of Walters-Storyk Design Group, the overarching goal of the 12 week program was to detail full acoustic (and otherwise) design of a conceptual recording studio, learning or reinforcing design principles along the way. Below is some key design milestones, and final design for the conceptual JStudio, which stretched my mostly undeveloped architectural design and SketchUp skills to the limit. The full detail design can be found in the pdf attached at the end.
Design Brief
- Concept “home” studio, non-commercial use.
- Live room (5-6 musicians, grand piano) and control/composition room (mix engineer + 2-3 people).
- Attached workshop/lab space.
- Studio is detached from a residential dwelling (no amenities required).
- View aspect to be leveraged.
Bubble Diagrams and Initial Sketches
Low Frequency Design
Low frequency design was carried out via FEA simulation in MATLAB, very similar in method to some previous simulations from this post and this post. This was an interesting advancement, which included importing .stl geometry from SketchUp. The key goal of the analysis was to the modal frequencies of the live and control room, and the location of the nodal/antinodal positions. This information can than be leveraged to inform position of low frequency treatment.
The main noted limitation to this method is that there is no information about relative intensity between modes – although we know the frequency of the modes, but we don’t know whether they will actually be a problem. There is an alternative BEM software called ABEC that I will hopefully be diving into in the future.
Monitoring
The monitoring position was analysed using a reflection study, as well as looking at the pressure response of each mode along the line of symmetry. This allows for an optimal position to be chosen which avoids room nulls (you can tame a peak, but can’t claw your way out of a null).
Treatments
Absorptive and diffusive elements were placed to mitigate reflections, and meet an RT60 design goal calculated using the sabine formula. Variable acoustic elements were used in the live room (sliding panels on the long wall) to allow control over reverb time for recording a range of program material.
Final Design
Some images and a flythrough of the final design can be found below. I’m particularly happy with the control room in general, and the ceiling design in the live room (thanks to my partner for some inspiration!). There are some aspects of the live room that I think could be refined given more time. Overall though, I think this would make a nice little home studio. I hope to do more self driven design projects such as these, they are an excellent way to learn a whole bunch of new techniques, and work out some less used acoustics muscles (for me, architectural design and design for both form and function).
