Jack Randorff Quotations

We've all seen games when they make play-by-play calls and you can actually hear the call two or three times, due to echoes in the space. That's the sort of thing you don't want here, because that interferes with what we want in terms of good, clean speech intelligibility.

If we have echoes, those echoes step on top of the spoken word, and then you can't understand it. And if you can't understand the words here, there's no reason for a convention.

And they're the people most likely to want to hear every word.

And you have to visualize it in three dimensions. Because that's the way sound behaves.

Concrete is a very hard, dense surface that sound bounces off, almost like a billiard ball would bounce off a hard edge. Or if you think of a sound wave as a wave of water, it hits a wall and splashes back as an echo. Or if you think of a flashlight pointed at a mirror, that light would bounce right off and create a glare -- an echo is like an acoustical glare.

Slate's very, very hard. If too much sound from the crowd hits that stage wall, it will bounce back and hit the speaker at the podium from behind as a giant echo, and that could really disturb them as they're delivering a speech.