Octave 9: Raisbeck Music Center

Octave 9: Raisbeck Music Center creates an immersive, experimental, educational and performance arts venue at Benaroya Hall, home of the Seattle Symphony. Incorporating sophisticated digital acoustics and projection technology, the interior renovation creates a highly flexible environment of “electronic architecture,” unbound by the dimensions of the room and allowing it to feel acoustically as reverberant as a concert hall, or as compact as the actual room. From this flexible platform, the project offers a hub for artistic and high-tech partnerships to explore new worlds of musical expression in downtown Seattle.

From inception, Octave 9 was guided by a desire to design for equitable communities. All the seating can be arranged in the circular central space accessible from the main entrance. The project provides access to experimentation and creates a welcoming incubator for historically omitted demographics in the traditional symphony format, youth, families, and the creative community across the Puget Sound region. The space expands on the Seattle Symphony’s well-established educational focus while providing a venue to host performances, meetings, and community events. The project serves as an experimental space for artists and composers while providing a transformable space to accommodate large groups, while providing 13 curving screens on circular tracks with numerous options for interactive projections, including a nearly-360-degree immersive experience.

To support the immersive experience, Octave 9 can transform acoustically and visually, allowing for an experience that can be customized to the programming. Using a sophisticated digital acoustic system, the room can be configured to produce musical experiences that cross genres, disciplines, and realities. An array of microphones captures the sound within the space, digital processors manipulate the signal in real time to recreate early reflections and reverberation and then play the modified sound back through an array of loudspeakers in the ceiling and casework to imitate the acoustic performance of nearly any setting.

All surfaces and materials needed to be absorptive to limit the presence of acoustic reflections: floors are carpeted; casework is made of micro-perforated wood; resting instruments go into built-in storage spaces; a mobile bar for social events can be rolled out or put away. Speakers, microphones, projectors, lighting, and HVAC are all integrated into a custom-designed acoustically absorptive ceiling. Composed of an array of sound-absorbing cells made of a recycled plastic felt-like material, the ceiling design optimizes the room’s acoustic goals while also integrating technical, electrical, and mechanical systems, including 10 projectors, 72 speakers, 28 microphones, and 68 color-changing LED lights. The result is an intimate venue that is highly flexible and capable of morphing to the needs of the performance or activity.

The project represented a unique opportunity for the architect to also serve as the fabricator of the acoustic ceiling. Parametric modeling was used to generate the cellular geometry of the ceiling, allowing it to respond to the optimized layout of the other systems. This model also generated all the necessary fabrication information for CNC cutting and identified the 687 cells, no two of which are the same.