Description
Part of the School of Creative and Performing Arts, the Humber Recording offers professional studio spaces. The double-height recording studio is a wooden box with walls and ceilings wrapped in a shell of honey-toned maple and walnut resonators and paneling rhythmically undulating with varying widths and depth. Pivoting panels with sound absorptive / reflective sides allow the users to customize their spaces.
The facility was designed to attract top-quality faculty and students and to infuse students with the skills and understanding of the technical world of music production. Its combination of architecture and technical equipment makes it unique in the world as a teaching facility of this caliber.
The starting point for the design was to address the constraints of renovating the existing 1980s building and to satisfy the technical requirements to establish superb acoustical conditions for the program of 360 students. Working closely with Professor Ian Terry of the College and acoustical consultant Bob Richards of The Delarson Group Inc., Gow Hastings contributed its expertise in adapting “real life” scenarios for teaching purposes and adding some finesse to an otherwise non-descript building.
The result is a first-class facility including a recording studio with two isolation booths, a control room, digital audio interactive workstations, an electronic classroom/ alternative recording space and administration spaces. Wood is used as a signature material throughout, expressing universality and warmth, but also
practically employed for acoustical purposes.
The highlight of the complex is its double-height recording studio with an appealing mixture of acoustics, architecture and art. Essentially a self-contained wooden box that floats within the existing building, the studio is able to respond
to movements from extreme vibrations. Its walls and ceiling are wrapped in a sculptural shell of honey-toned and dark wood resonators and paneling rhythmically undulating with varying widths and depth. The pattern is based on studies of DNA patterns, jazz scores and player piano notes.
The adjoining control room houses the department’s prized Solid State Logic Duality Recording Console from the UK, the most innovative dual function mixing desk on the market, which overwhelms with its array of knobs and switches. On the back wall, an intricately constructed wood quadratic diffuser, custom built in the United States, diffuses sound waves while also creating an elegant sculptural backdrop. Raking the floor, insetting ancillary audio processing units into mobile consoles and integrating high-resolution cameras and drop-down plasma screens, ensures that students have a clear view of what the engineer is doing.
On the building’s exterior, the studio intriguingly expresses itself as a solid black box of zinc, (reminiscent of an amplifier), and a blind wraparound window of mullion-free, frosted glass. These unexpected moves enhances the existing courtyard and invites curiosity about what is contained within.
