Concert Halls Call on This Japanese Engineer to Shape Sound

Behind some of the world’s most reputed concert halls is a Japanese engineer whose finesse in shaping sound is so perfectly unobtrusive that all listeners hear is the music in all its subtlety, texture and fullness.

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Yasuhisa Toyota’s talents are coveted as classical music venues are increasingly designed in “vineyard style,” where audiences surround the stage to hear the performers up close and enjoy an almost-interactive experience, feeling more like a part of the music and being able to be seen and respond to it.

Toyota’s Nagata Acoustics has just 20 employees globally, but it dominates acoustics work for halls in Japan and is expanding abroad. He’s designed the acoustics for orchestras in Los Angeles, Helsinki, Paris and Shanghai. Another of his projects, the Elbephilharmonie concert hall in Hamburg, opened Jan. 11.

Still, when asked to summarize the reason for success, Toyota hesitates. So many factors are involved in fine-tuning acoustics, and each hall has a different design, creating fresh challenges.

“No one can explain in one word why a Stradivarius violin sounds so beautiful, or how the way it was made may have shaped that beautiful sound,” Toyota said in a recent interview at his Tokyo home.

“Whether sound is beautiful, clear or pleasant is extremely complex,” he said. “So when we’re talking about acoustics in a concert hall, there is basically that space itself.”

Toyota, 64, is not a musician but was raised listening to and loving classical music. He founded his company in 1971. It has headquarters in Tokyo and Los Angeles, which is his main home these days as he oversees Nagata’s projects outside Japan

Toyota coined the expression “psycho-acoustics” to describe the importance of emotions and other senses in sound. Would a pink violin, for instance, sound as good as a brown one, he asks?