Sound Blog

flutter glitch · May 14, 2005 by Matt Gilbert

Acoustic Shadows is a great BBC program about several amazing spaces. It outlines several architectural strategies, from the fragile balancing act of performance hall design to sculpting bird chirps from the sides of Mayan pyramids. If anyone wants to take a road trip to Mexico, I’m down.

They mention a certain acoustic glitch called a flutter echo, where an otherwise pleasantly reverberant room will have a pocket of echoes in a certain spot that are so quick that they sound like a flutter. While this is usually a huge annoyance for an acoustic engineer or a performer, like any other glitch, there’s nothing keeping an entire aesthetic practice from coming out of this. The house I’m living in now has a couple of flutter echoes that my roommates and I play around with occasionally. Just as a digital glitch reveals something fascinating about its medium, these acoustic flutters reveal something about the way sounds travel through their medium.

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