Case Study 34-1: The Dallas Symphony Hall Disaster and Its Acoustic Rescue

The Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center and the Expensive Education of Acoustic Failure

On September 6, 1989, the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center opened in Dallas, Texas, to considerable fanfare. Designed by the celebrated architect I.M. Pei — the same architect who would add the glass pyramid entrance to the Louvre the same year — the Meyerson was heralded as a cultural landmark for the city, a statement of architectural ambition and civic pride. The building's distinctive curved limestone exterior and its grand public spaces were everything the city had hoped for. Inside the Eugene McDermott Concert Hall, however, something was deeply wrong.

The musicians who stepped onto the stage of the new hall found themselves in an acoustic environment that did not work. Strings could not hear the brass section. The brass could not hear each other clearly. Soloists reported that the hall's acoustics felt unpredictable — some notes seemed to disappear entirely from the stage, while others bloomed unexpectedly loud. Audience members in different sections of the hall experienced dramatically different sound quality. What had gone wrong, and how did it get fixed?

The Physical Problems

The Meyerson's acoustic difficulties arose from several interrelated physical issues, and understanding them requires returning to the fundamental physics of concert hall design.

The most serious problem was inadequate stage acoustics. The Eugene McDermott Concert Hall, like many concert halls designed in the mid-20th century, prioritized audience sightlines and architectural openness over acoustic performance. The stage was large and the ceiling above the performing area was high — meaning that early reflections returning to the musicians on stage were weak, delayed, and directionally diffuse. The metric for stage acoustics is ST1 (Stage Support Factor), which measures the ratio of early lateral reflections returning to the stage within 100 ms to the direct sound. When ST1 is inadequate, musicians cannot hear each other clearly.

This problem is not merely one of comfort. When orchestral musicians cannot hear their colleagues clearly, they lose the temporal coordination that makes ensemble playing possible. Slight variations in rhythm, intonation, and dynamic balance that the human ear normally corrects through rapid feedback become unmanageable. A string section that cannot hear the principal violin cannot follow bowing cues. A wind section that cannot hear the oboe cannot match intonation. The acoustic environment of the stage is not background scenery — it is an active participant in the performance.

The second major problem was uneven sound distribution across the audience. The Meyerson's hall geometry — a modified horseshoe shape with multiple levels of balcony seating — created areas of strong sound and acoustic "dead zones" where music arrived diminished and poorly defined. This arose from a combination of factors: the geometry of upper balconies that shadowed lower seating, the shape of the ceiling that directed sound toward some areas while leaving others underserved, and the absence of adequate lateral reflections in sections of the hall far from the side walls.

Third, the hall had RT60 that fell short of design targets at low frequencies. For the warm, full bass resonance that characterizes great concert halls, RT60 must not only be long (1.8–2.2 s at mid-frequencies) but should also be equal or slightly longer at low frequencies (125–250 Hz). The Meyerson's measured RT60 dropped noticeably in the bass region, producing a thinness and lack of warmth that musicians and critical listeners noticed immediately.

The Role of Acoustic Consultant Russell Johnson

The remediation of the Meyerson Symphony Center is largely the story of acoustic consultant Russell Johnson of Artec Consultants, who had been involved in the original design but whose recommendations were apparently not fully implemented in the construction. Johnson had by the late 1980s accumulated decades of experience with concert hall acoustics, and his diagnosis of the Meyerson's problems was systematic and physically grounded.

Johnson's primary intervention was the design and installation of a acoustically adjustable canopy system above the stage — a system of large, reflective panels suspended from the ceiling at carefully calculated heights above the orchestra. The physics of canopy design is precise: panels positioned too high above the musicians provide reflections too late to be useful for ensemble coordination; panels positioned correctly (typically 8–12 m above the floor of the stage) provide early reflections within the critical 100 ms window. The panels' size, angle, and spacing determine which frequencies are reflected efficiently (panels must be large relative to the wavelength of the sound they reflect: for bass frequencies below 200 Hz, effective panels are several meters in dimension).

Johnson also redesigned elements of the hall's upper canopy and wall geometry to improve the distribution of early reflections to the audience, and specified acoustic finishing treatments on surfaces that had been specified in aesthetically "hard" materials that provided insufficient reflectivity.

The Expensive Lessons

The Meyerson's acoustic rescue was not cheap. The remediation work, which included physical modifications to the hall structure as well as the installation of new acoustic canopy systems, cost millions of dollars — a substantial fraction of the original construction cost. Several hard lessons emerged from this experience that have since been incorporated into standard acoustic design practice:

Lesson 1: Acoustic consulting is not optional. The Meyerson's problems arose in part because the acoustic requirements were not fully integrated into the architectural design from the earliest stages. When acoustic and architectural goals conflict — as they often do — the resolution of that conflict must happen at the design stage, not after construction.

Lesson 2: Simulation is not sufficient. The computational tools available in the late 1980s could model some aspects of the hall's acoustic behavior, but they could not predict every detail of the stage acoustic experience. The humans who would perform in the hall and their specific needs were not adequately parameterized in the models.

Lesson 3: Stage acoustics are as important as audience acoustics. Most acoustic design effort focuses on the audience experience. The Meyerson case demonstrated compellingly that the performing musicians' acoustic environment is equally critical — a hall in which musicians cannot perform well will never sound good regardless of its audience acoustics.

Lesson 4: RT60 frequency uniformity requires explicit design. Low-frequency warmth does not happen automatically in large spaces. It requires deliberate design of surfaces that reflect bass energy and materials that do not over-absorb it.

The Hall Today

The remediated Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center, following the acoustic work that addressed these problems, has been home to the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and has earned a respectable reputation. It is no longer considered among the acoustically deficient halls it was initially, and the interventions Russell Johnson designed have brought its measured acoustic metrics into ranges consistent with high-quality performance.

But the Meyerson case endures as a cautionary example in the acoustic engineering literature — a reminder that architectural excellence and acoustic excellence are independent qualities that must both be designed for explicitly. The beauty of I.M. Pei's building was genuine; the acoustic problems were equally genuine. The fix was expensive, time-consuming, and humbling. In a field where failures are literally audible to thousands of people, the stakes of getting acoustic design right are both cultural and financial.

Discussion Questions

The Meyerson case demonstrates that architect and acoustic consultant priorities can conflict. How should these conflicts be resolved in a major performing arts project? Who should have final say over decisions that affect both architectural aesthetics and acoustic performance?
The stage acoustic problems at the Meyerson caused musicians difficulty in hearing each other. How does this connect to the fundamental physics of sound propagation, and what specific metrics (ST1, early reflection density) could have been measured before construction to predict the problem?
Consider the economic argument: if acoustic remediation costs millions of dollars, but the original acoustic consulting work that would have prevented the problem cost significantly less, why do acoustic problems still occur in new construction? What institutional or economic factors create this outcome?
The Meyerson's RT60 fell short at low frequencies. Using Sabine's formula, describe what physical characteristics of the hall likely caused this — and what physical interventions would most effectively address it.
Compare the Meyerson's experience with the history of the Vienna Musikverein (1870), which achieved exceptional acoustics without computational modeling. What does this comparison tell us about the relationship between acoustic design knowledge and acoustic outcomes?