Improving room acoustics, wool or cotton threads.

[coulonnus]

In this document http://www.archive.org/details/sancesde ... 03physgoog the famous French organ builder Cavaillé-Coll claims he can reduce the reverberation of a room with many threads of wool or cotton across the room. The document is Séances de la Société française de physique, 1877, in French.

The article is reduced to pp 24-25 of the pdf. If you do not want to download the pdf you can view the Full Text version and search "fils de laine".

Has anybody more scientific information? (required length, diameter of the threads, thread direction etc.) Is anybody aware of a paper by Robert S. Gregg? Reducing some rooms' reverberation would be useful both for music and for other situations Cavaillé-Coll was proud because the process is cheap and easy.

[coulonnus]

I found an English translation of Lavignac's Music and Musicians here: http://www.archive.org/stream/musicmusi ... i_djvu.txt
Search "knitting" to find the relevant paragraph. It brings some more information.

[coulonnus]

Dunno how to acoustically cancel out a gossiping audience in a concert.

[Peterdyson49]

It is the mobile phones going off that disturb.... the woman behind me the other night just ignored her phone until her companion complained....(and why is it always in the quiet bits when the concert is being recorded?) .... "but I don't know how to turn it off" she cried.. "no one has every rung me in a concert before" !!!!! Eek!

Peter Dyson