Theater in Epidaurus (Greece)
The theater was built in the 4th century B.C. In ancient times it was used to entertain the nobility and the clergy, and it was believed that the theater had beneficial effects on the physical and mental health of people. For a long time nobody knew about the amphitheater – it was excavated by archaeologist Panagis Kavadias only at the turn of XIX-XX centuries. In 1928 the first production after the excavations, a tragedy by Sophocles “Electra” was staged there, and since 1955 the Amphitheatre in Epidaurus became a festival with Greek and foreign actors. The famous Greek actress Maria Callas sang here.

The best-preserved ancient theater in Greece is not only incredibly beautiful, but it also has stunning acoustics.

Opera festival on a floating stage (Bregenz, Austria)
Every summer thousands of people from all over the world flock to the small Austrian town of Bregenz for the opera festival, which centers around a floating stage. Bregenz festival takes place since 1946, but in recent years it has become extremely popular. Its success is due to the stage in the middle of the waters of Lake Constance. The unusual stage offers theater directors new opportunities, and so the productions in Bregenz are famous for their scenic designs and the most unpredictable sets. An open-air auditorium with a capacity of 7,000 people is the ideal place to see all this beauty at once. Apart from the main – floating – stage, there are other stages, which allows the festival to hold about a hundred events during a month. Check out the festival program at www.bregenzerfestspiele.com.

In addition to the performances there is a lot to see in Bregenz. In the Upper Town it is worth paying attention to the ancient buildings XIII-XVI centuries, the tower of St. Martin, the symbol of Bregenz, Town Hall in 1662 and the Gothic Church of St. Gall, built, however, already in the XVIII century.

Hollywood Bowl (Los Angeles, USA)
Los Angeles, the show business capital of the world, simply must have the largest amphitheater in the United States. Rock stars perform in the Hollywood Bowl, it often hosts theatrical productions – opera, ballet, symphonic concerts, in particular the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra and the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra play. Sometimes concerts are accompanied by fireworks for special effect.

You’ll find Fred Astaire and Rudolph Nureyev dancing, Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday, Andrea Boccelli and Placido Domingo, Cher and Elton John, the Beatles and the Doors, Arthur Rubinstein and Vladimir Horowitz and many, many others singing. For a poster and to purchase tickets, visit www.hollywoodbowl.com. When you go to the evening concert, bring a sweater – nights in California can be chilly even in the summer, and take something to eat: traditionally, the audience has a picnic before the concert.

The Baths of Caracalla (Rome, Italy)
There are quite a few ancient baths preserved in Rome, but the Thermae of Caracalla is the most famous. Once it was a kind of spa where people came not only to steam, bathe, swim in the pool and do sports, but also to communicate with friends, discuss the latest news and even to meet lovers. In the social life of ancient Rome, the Thermae played a huge role. Today the Thermae of Caracalla attract lovers of ancient ruins and music lovers – against the natural scenery of ancient ruins and under the southern Italian sky the familiar works look very different.

In 1990 it was in the Thermae of Caracalla that a concert of the Three Tenors – Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo and José Carreras – took place. To find out what’s going on at the Caracalla Thermae, visit the Roman Opera’s website: www.operaroma.it.

Waldbühne (Berlin, Germany)
The Forest Open-air Theatre, which seats 22,000 people, usually hosts rock musicians, but once a year they give way to classical performers: the famous Berlin Philharmonic plays its season finale on the popular rock stage, aided by opera stars Plácido Domingo, René Fleming, Anna Netrebko and others. Listeners sit on the stairs of the amphitheater or on the grass, and the concert traditionally ends with Paul Linke’s march “In the Air of Berlin,” the unofficial anthem of the German capital. In a united impulse, thousands of people light the Bengal lights.

However, in the history of the Waldbühne was not only music, but also sports. The Forest Theater was originally built as a sports facility for the 1936 Olympics and was used as a venue for gymnastics competitions. Then there were movies, boxing matches, and then rock concerts. During the performance of the Rolling Stones on 15 September 1965, fans literally demolished the Waldbühne, and the stage was not reconstructed until seven years later.

Nebworth House (Hertfordshire, UK)
Nebworth House is one of Britain’s oldest residential castles and one of its most prestigious open-air concert venues. It’s been in the hands of the old Leighton family for over 500 years, but today the doors are open to those who aren’t part of the British aristocracy. You can visit the main house and gardens at Nebworth House, but the main thing many people come here for is the concerts of star rock and pop performers, which are held every weekend in the summer. It’s just more proof that Britain honors tradition while keeping up with, and sometimes ahead of, the times.

Even if you don’t like rock music and prefer a quieter pastime, you’ll still enjoy Nebworth House’s steeped history and its Neo-Gothic image, looking as if you’ve read an English novel or a painting by an English master. Nebworth House has a beautiful garden, a dinosaur theme park and a children’s railroad.

Arena di Verona (Rome, Italy)
The Roman amphitheater was built in Verona around the year 30 for gladiatorial fights. An earthquake in 1117 almost completely destroyed the outer ring of the amphitheater and the stones from its walls were used as building material for other buildings. Centuries later the willing quenched their need for spectacle here. Today it is the most famous open-air opera house and a perfectly preserved ancient amphitheatre, second in size only to the Colosseum in Rome.

Renowned for its incredible acoustics, the Arena di Verona was reopened in 1913, when the entire world was preparing to celebrate the centenary of Giuseppe Verdi’s birth – an unusual venue was needed to stage his opera Aida. In 1947, Maria Callas performed here. Many opera stars, including Placido Domingo, Luciano Pavarotti and Renata Tebaldi, have performed under the Verona sky.

From June to September the Arena di Verona hosts opera productions and concerts by international stars. The summer music festival is enormously popular, so buy your tickets in advance. You can do so at www.arena.it.

Dubrovnik Summer Festival (Dubrovnik, Croatia)
In summer, Dubrovnik becomes an open-air concert venue – a summer festival is held in the city, and the scenery for concerts, theatrical performances, operas and ballets are the historic buildings of the Old Town – the Cathedral, St. Vlasija Cathedral and the 15th century Knežev Palace. The cultural program is usually designed for evening, while during the day you can sunbathe on the Adriatic and explore the sites. The starry sky, the light breeze from the sea, the majestic works of ancient masters perfectly complement the impression of the divine sounds of music. The festival has been held since 1950 and historically emerged as a cultural bridge between Western and Eastern Europe, which were on opposite sides of the barricades after World War II. Until now European culture is one of the main focuses of the festival. Check www.dubrovnikfestival.hr for dates.

Meredith Amphitheater (Australia)
In December, when it’s winter in the northern hemisphere, Australia is in the height of summer and time for the massive three-day Meredith Music Festival. It takes place at the Meredith Supernatural Amphitheatre, an open-air theater located on a private farm in the small town of Meredith near Melbourne, Australia’s Capital of Culture.

The city hosts a huge number of events, and Melbourne ranks first in the country for the number of theaters. The National Ballet of Australia and Royal Melbourne Philharmonic Orchestra are based here so if you’re not interested in rock and pop at the Meredith Festival you’ll still find music to suit your tastes.

The festival has been running since 1991 and is extremely popular. It’s not easy to get in: some tickets are sold by lottery on a subscription basis, others are sold in Melbourne record stores, and only what’s left goes on public sale online.

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Walls and ceilings play an important role in how we hear music. They absorb or reflect sound waves, or do both bit by bit. A sound engineer’s main job is to control these reflections, because they make a big difference in the audible sound. Imagine a large concert hall: long and narrow, with a hard surface. It’s no accident.

“In a concert hall, you hear reflections from the walls and ceilings,” says Trevor Cox, professor of acoustic engineering at Salford University in England and author of “The Sound Book: The Science of Sound Wonders of Light. “Those extra seconds of sound embellish the music and give you a sense of encompassment. Outdoors, the sounds go away.

So, how can you make the most of an acoustically suboptimal situation?

First, stick to fast music. Some genres need reverb – those that reflect sound waves. Slow-moving pieces benefit from three seconds of lingering sound. It blends the notes together, creating an ethereal feel. That’s why cavernous churches with hard, stone-like reflective surfaces are great places for organ music. Dynamic music, like rock ‘n’ roll and hip-hop, needs less: you don’t want to hear the aftermath of notes when the musicians are already four bars ahead of you.

Outdoor venues usually have little natural reverberation. Sound waves travel up and outward without bumping into anything, and the random objects they bump into, such as grass and human flesh, are absorbing. Even if reverberation were possible, sound engineers wouldn’t necessarily want to use it. They might have to prevent sound from penetrating nearby houses. They also worry about the weather: with temperature inversion-when cold air is trapped under a layer of warmer air-the sound rising up can be reflected back into the audience, fighting unpredictably against new sounds coming from the speakers. The best tactic in these circumstances is to create a focused sound beam.

“Expanded speakers send music in a certain direction, like a spotlight,” Cox says. “You can place speakers with different directivity to create patterns and confine the sound to a very focused area. When you’re swept up in an explosion of that kind of sound, you want rock ‘n’ roll or more upbeat jazz. If you have to go to an outdoor classical concert, try something bright, like baroque music.

Some outdoor environments provide better sound than others. The best place is a seating area with a slant and a stage below. There’s a reason why amphitheaters have been set up this way for thousands of years, and not just to help people from behind see.

“Greek amphitheaters are amazing places,” Cox says. “They seem to have used stage space to add reflections from the floor, and the high seats keep the sound from going through too many heads.”

Position yourself in a spot with an unobstructed line between you and several speakers to improve your listening experience. But that’s not the only factor to consider when holding an outdoor concert.

First, don’t sit too close to the speakers. The sound they produce is intended for people hundreds of feet away, often over several obstacles. Standing only a few feet away is the sound equivalent of drinking from a fire hydrant.

Then find the mixing desk. The sound engineer is usually about two-thirds of the distance between the stage and the back of the auditorium. If you sit close by, you get the sound exactly as the engineer thinks it should be heard.

If the sound engineer is moved away from the stage, you should wander around before deciding where to sit. Different surfaces absorb sound at different frequencies. (For example, manufacturers stuff car doors with materials that absorb high frequencies, so you hear a distinct thud when you close the door, Cox writes in his book.) and high frequencies. It helps to stop and close your eyes once in a while: our heavy reliance on sight undermines our subtle listening skills.

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The theater, dating back to the 4th century B.C. and arranged in 55 semicircular rows, remains the great masterpiece of Polycletus the Younger. Audiences of up to 14,000 have long been able to hear the actors and musicians without amplification, even from the back row of the architectural masterpiece.

How this sound quality was achieved has been the source of academic and amateur speculation, with some theories suggesting that prevailing winds carry the sounds or mask the amplified voices.

Echoes in the seats
Now researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have discovered that the limestone material of the seats provides a filtering effect by suppressing the low frequencies of voices, thereby minimizing the background noise of the crowd. In addition, rows of limestone seats reflect high frequencies back to the audience, amplifying the effect.

Researcher Nico Declerk, a mechanical engineer, initially suspected that the tilt of the theater had something to do with the effect.

“When I first encountered this problem, I thought the great acoustic effect had to do with the surface waves rising through the theater with virtually no attenuation,” Declerk said. “While the performers’ voices were sounding, I didn’t expect that the low frequencies of speech would also be filtered out to some degree.”

However, ultrasonic wave experiments and numerical models showed that frequencies up to 500 hertz (cycles per second) were reduced and frequencies above 500 hertz were not reduced, he said.

Acoustic traps.
The corrugations on the surface of the seats act as natural acoustic traps. Although this effect would also seem to remove low frequencies from actors’ voices, listeners actually fill in the missing part of the sound spectrum through a phenomenon known as virtual pitch. The human brain reconstructs the missing frequencies, creating a virtual pitch phenomenon, as when listening to someone speaking on the phone without low frequencies.

Surprisingly, the Greek theater builders themselves did not understand the principles that led to the exceptional audibility of sound from the stage.

Attempts to recreate the design of the Epidaurus never matched the original. Later seating used other materials, such as wood for benches, which may have ultimately thwarted efforts to duplicate the design.

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That spring night, “in typical Colorado weather style,” was far from ideal for an outdoor show. It was snowy and cold. That’s another part of the legend. The weather at Red Rocks is very cool.

“And there was side winds all over the place,” said a Denver-based software developer. “I noticed … the saxophone, falsetto singing was getting very strong at some points and getting very soft at some points.”

“The sonic irregularities” he heard from high up did not appear in the videos of the same concert he watched later. Those videos were shot much closer to the stage than his nosebleed seats. This prompted him to ask Colorado Wonders , “are there any advantages or disadvantages to sitting far or close to the stage when you’re at a show at Red Rocks.”

Andy Torrey, front-office engineer for Colorado band Big Head Todd & the Monsters , guesses what Harold heard that night atop the amphitheater.

“The farther up the mountain you go, the stronger the wind can play,” explained Torrey Stochero. “Sidewind will play on that even more, and you can get a swirling sound where it sounds good one minute and then sounds like the vocals or acoustic guitar are disappearing the next.”

It seems unfair to consider Red Rock acoustically perfect. For a show there to sound great, the sound team has to overcome a lot of challenges. Torrey has voiced about 20 concerts at Red Rocks, including the Big Head Todd concert in June.

He said it was a “smooth” night. But they’re not always so smooth, and at outdoor venues like Red Rocks, he often has to work against temperature, wind, humidity and altitude.

“They all affect the sound differently,” he said. A little rain isn’t necessarily a bad thing, though.

“The humidity actually helps spread the sound … while the wind can take it away,” Torrey said. “I performed in Aspen a few years ago when it snowed at a concert, and I don’t know if it ever sounded better.”

The steep climb is also a problem for both the sound and the audience coming in. Torrey said he could set the speakers with a slight incline “to go up the hill and be powerful going up the hill.”

Torrey tests the sound no matter where the band is performing to prepare for as many scenarios as possible. Pink Noise, which “has equal energy per octave,” helps him understand which frequencies are amplified or attenuated by the acoustics of the room. From there, he can align the overall mix that will be sent to the speakers that night.

He will do all this work beforehand, but he can also make adjustments throughout the show.

“One of the things about live sound is that it ends in an instant. You don’t have the ability to rewind, you deal with the situation and keep moving.”

The packed Red Rocks is also a jolt. All of these bodies can “really help the sound.” True, with the screaming crowd in the stands, the soundcheck didn’t happen.

“And so the reflective surfaces of the seating stairs reflect off of you, as opposed to a concert where all the people are absorbing the sound,” Torrey said. “They can yell and scream and add their level of noise to the show. But they also absorb the sound and create a different environment.”

So, is there a better place to sit? Torrey likes to sit close, about 17th row. But that’s also very subjective, and everyone’s best seats are different. He said that if you like your music loud, you’ll have more fun up front. If not, “go higher up the hill where it’s not as powerful.”

“You can move from left to right, and that can change,” Torrey said. “So really move and find your place. Every place is different. Every concert is special.”

Dominguez is often at Red Rocks shows, about 10 every summer, he said. But now, with this new information about where to sit, he felt “like a more educated Red Rocks concertgoer” with a deeper understanding of what goes on in the sound booth – even if the sound isn’t perfect.

“I’d come back here if no one was creating the sound, but just playing it from my iPod,” he said. “Concert or not, there’s something special about this place.

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