The Harry Clark Prize for room acoustics is named after the acoustician who, in 1919, was engaged by the Chairman of the House and Furnishing Committee of the House of Representatives in Wellington, New Zealand.
His report on the reasons why the Chamber in the new parliament building had poor acoustics is a remarkable 8-page document full of a comments and observations that are simply true. Most of these truths would be confirmed decades later by experiment. A long way ahead of his time.
My paper Recent development in Visualisations for Acoustics was awarded the inaugural paper. In the paper, I demonstrate how visualisation does not have to be static, engineered and complex. That in fact, it can speak for itself to a non-technical audience, while providing a mean to check that a concert hall design serves all sections of the orchestra. A win-win.
In the presentation, I simply emphasized the need to rethink our undecipherable reports filled with complex graphics, and instead, to reimagine how we visualize sound in performance spaces. Here is an example, with sound:
Acoustic Research & Design Ltd 