The Acoustic Algorithm of the Angel Orensanz Foundation is cloned all over Europe

With roaring success, The Wooster Theatre Group of New York performed from May 19 to the 24th at the Kaii Theatre in Brussels (Belgium) the opera La Didone, composed by Francesco Cavalli and Gian Francesco Busenello (Venice, 1641).

This production is not just another magnificent presentation of the groundbreaking theatre of New York. It brings to the heart of Europe a significant piece of New York itself. The singers, choirs and instruments play live and the audiences follow their live interpretation, but the “acoustic space� in which the opera is sung and heard is not the Theater Kaai, in Brussels, but the actual space of the Angel Orensanz Foundation: seven thousand miles away on Norfolk St., in New York.

The Wooster Theater Group is going to replicate the same portent from May 30 to June 2 at the Rotterdamse Schoouwburg in Rotterdam (The Netherlands). This world experiment will culminate at the Edinburg International Festival (August 18-22).

Bruce Odland, the music director of The Wooster Theater, explains that he decided on the Angel Orensanz Foundation over the Cathedral of Chartres (France) and the Mechanic’s Hall in Boston because of the world uniqueness of the Orensanz Building: “We set up very good mics and preamp at the back of the Orensanz Building, and set an accurate loudspeaker at the front. We then played back a specially prepared “sine� wave that sweeps at a specific speed through the entire range of human hearing from 20 cycles per second to 20,000 cps. We then put this recording into the computer which calculates the difference between the pure tone and the recording of the tone we made carrying all the reflections of the wood, ceiling, walls, architecture dimensions, materials, and generates an algorhythm that gives the unique colors of the Angel Oransanz Foundation hall to whatever signal we send to it�.

During the production in the European theaters, all the actors and musicians wear microphones. We send the sound of their voices into the “Angel Orensanz algorhythm� and then bring it out of speakers we had placed around the room. The result, even though your senses tell you are on a black box theatre, your ears tell you that you are in a wooden cathedral-like space in Lower Manhattan�.

In 1849-50, a young architect of Berlin built in Lower Manhattan a unique neogothic space, what today is the Angel Orensanz Foundation. Besides the supreme harmony of this building he endowed it with unique, almost perfect acoustic qualities. Alexander Saeltzer is considered as the first specialist, in the modern times, of architectural acoustics. His book “A Treatise on Acoustics� was published in New York in 1872.