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Cut the chatter ! The ancient mystery surrounding the great acoustics of the theater at Epidaurus in Greece has been lick .
The theater , dating to the 4th hundred B.C. and arranged in 55 semi - circular wrangle , remains the great masterwork of Polykleitos the Younger . consultation of up to an estimated 14,000 have long been capable to hear actors andmusicians – unamplified – from even the back row of the architectural masterpiece .
The Theater at Epidaurus on the Peloponnese in Greece
How this sonic quality was achieved has been the source of academic and unpaid supposition , with some theories suggesting that prevail wind carry sounds or masks amplified part .
It ’s in the hindquarters
Now , researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology have discovered that the limestone fabric of the seating room offer a sink in effect , suppressing depressed frequencies of voice , thus minimizing desktop crowd noise . Further , the rows of limestone seat speculate high - frequencies back towards the audience , enhancing the upshot .
Researcher Nico Declercq , a mechanical engine driver , initially surmise that the incline of the theater had something to do with the upshot .
" When I first undertake this job , I thought that the consequence of the splendidacousticswas due to Earth’s surface waves climbing the dramaturgy with almost no damp , " Declercq say . " While the voice of the performers were being carried , I did n’t anticipate that the blue frequency of talking to were also filtered out to some extent . "
However , experimentation withultrasonic wavesand numerical role model indicated that frequencies up to 500 cycle per second ( Hz per secondly ) were frown , and frequencies higher than 500 cycle per second went unrelieved , he said .
acoustical ambush
The corrugations on the surface of the ass move as natural acoustic ambush . Though this effect would seem to also remove the depressed frequencies from the actors ' voices , listeners actually fill in the missing portion of the audio recording spectrum through a phenomenon known as virtual slant . The human brain reconstructs the miss frequencies , produce the virtual pitch phenomenon , as in listening to someone speaking on a phone with no low end .
The findings are detailed in the April military issue of theJournal of the Acoustics Society of America .
astonishingly , the Greek builders of the theater did not themselves realize the principle that led to the exceptional audibility of strait from the stage .
Attempts to vivify the Epidaurus design never quite check the original . Later seating arrangements featured other textile , such as Grant Wood for the bench , an approach which may have at long last derail the intent duplication effort .
