Symphony Center
Georgian concert hall whose acoustics were debated and reworked for nearly a century.
This guide to Symphony Center in Chicago opens on the hall's very first chords in 1904, when critics complained the room swallowed the bass and musicians on stage could barely hear one another. It follows the architect who volunteered to design the Georgian brick hall despite never having built a concert hall before, and the founding music director who died of pneumonia caught during rehearsals in the drafty new building, just weeks after conducting its dedication. The guide then turns to a 1960s attempt to fix the sound that made things worse, before circling back to what the hall's later renovators tried differently.
Audio guides are written and narrated by AI.