ADRIAN JAMES ACOUSTICS : NEWS AND VIEWS

Regular visitors to these pages (if there are any out there) may have noticed a few recent changes to the website.  Over the last month we have been working hard on some improvements to make it easier to get to the information you need.

These include a new search facility, a ‘Latest news’ feed, refinements to the navigation menus, new project case studies in the ‘What We’ve Done’ section and a mobile version of the site for people on the go.  The low-graphics mobile site is ideal both for visitors on slow connections (such as dial-up or 2G mobile networks) and for any partially-sighted visitors using screen readers (we have tested it with Thunder and WebbIE and ChromeVox in Chrome, which seemed to work fairly well).

We would welcome feedback to help us improve the site further; if you have any comments or suggestions for the site please do not hesitate to contact us.

We are pleased to announce that Andy Thompson has been awarded the Association of Noise Consultants prize for best Institute of Acoustics Diploma project report.  The project is entitled ‘A Study of French Horn Harmonics’, and involved lots of messing about with bits of hosepipe and FFT analysers.  For anyone interested in the strange workings of brass instruments the project can be downloaded here.  Andy plays Principal Horn in the Norwich Philharmonic, and he is happy to admit that the primary aim of the project was to provide ‘scientific’ excuses for all those split notes.

Andy studied for the Diploma in 2010-2011, and as well as the ANC prize was awarded a special commendation for achieving Merit grades in all the assessed components.  This is becoming a habit at AJA; Andy Oldridge also received a special commendation for achieving a full set of Merits when studying the Diploma in 2009-2010, and Ian Rees won the Diploma prize for best overall mark in 2005.

Andy was presented his prize by the ANC Chairman, Robert Adnitt, at the IoA Reproduced Sound Conference in Brighton, and our thanks to go to the ANC and IoA for their hospitality.

Adrian James Acoustics has recently commissioned ‘The Atrium’ at North Walsham High School.  This is a £5.3 million Government funded ‘Co-Location’ project designed to improve education, arts, and leisure facilities for students during school hours and provide facilities for the whole community at other times.  We were the acoustic consultants to the design team throughout the design phase; for more information on our involvement please see the project write-up in What We’ve Done >  Schools, Colleges & Universities.

The cinema is now screening films twice weekly.  Details of all the Atrium facilities, including cinema and theatre show times, can be found on their website at www.nwatrium.org.

While most of the world was knocking back the champagne, we were rather busy this New Year’s Eve installing and commissioning a new orchestra shell at the Mikhailovsky Theatre in St Petersburg ready for a New Year’s Eve concert of ‘American Masterpieces’ performed by the Mikhailovsky Orchestra, with Vasily Petrenko conducting.

We undertook the acoustic design and commissioning of the shell, working with Latvian engineers and fabricators Salons AIS and Russian event designers Show Consulting.  The shell was designed and constructed very rapidly over a period of less than two months.  We flew out to St Petersburg on 30 December to supervise the first installation and take acoustic commissioning measurements to assess the improvements provided by the new shell.  The new shell was installed and commissioned in eight hours overnight on 31 December, in time for the concert that evening.  We have put together a short timelapse video of the installation, which can be viewed at http://youtu.be/Sk2niI9bb2o.

 The concert, which included vocal performances from Indira Mahajan, Ailyn Perez, James Valenti and Sir Willard White, was a great success, playing to a full house.  The orchestra deftly handled the fast pace and frequent time signature changes of Bernstein and Gershwin’s livelier material, suggesting that the shell served its purpose well.  We hope the shell will see increasingly frequent use as the Theatre expands its concert programme.