Acoustically our challenge was to address the wide diversity of music education and performance in the Music School. And with a dome as part of the original design--this was no small problem.  Domes are notorious for their acoustical problems of focusing and whispering gallery effects.  We developed a dome diffuser which works on the same acoustic principal as balcony fronts in an opera house -- by scattering sound from the edges of a reflective panel.

Consider the typical horseshoe shape of an Italian opera house: if the balcony fronts were only reflective, there would be an uncomfortable focus of sound in the center of the main floor....but there isn't.  And the reason there isn't is that the sound waves are scattered by the edges of the balcony -- so to the listener the scattered sound appears to come from all along these curved edges and not from a mirror-image of the source.  Both in the opera house and in this dome, the scattering is not just a scattering in space: it is a spreading in time as the reflected and scattered energy travels to the listener from progressively more distant edges.  For this dome, our studies showed that the reflected and scattered sound would arrive at the listener over a period 30ms or more -- rather than all at once as would happen with an untreated dome.

In our design, we were not relying solely on edge-diffraction for the acoustical treatment.  In addition, the angle of the "petals" of the dome is selected to direct the sound to focus in the upper part of the room well above the occupied zone. Fifty-percent of the sound is directed to pass through through the gaps between petals to be absorbed behind the dome. This absorption of the sound helps control the loudness of the orchestra in this rehearsal room while the scattering helps the musicians hear one another.