The Oscar Larson Performing Arts Center Theater—Constrained volume and targeted reflections for speech intelligibility

In 2019, the South Dakota State University Oscar Larson Performing Arts Center opened in 2019 to great acclaim. The 850-seat theater has been a “game changer” for performing arts in Eastern South Dakota. Hosting lectures, road shows, musical theater, dance, and a wide range of other theatrical performance types, the needs of the theater included a speech heavy program with a goal of being able to host unamplified dramas without any sound reinforcement—a challenging program for an 850-seat theater. In this paper, we discuss the design of the theater, and the strategy for the support of speech as well as the other needs of the space, including an overall constraint of the reverberant volume with stringent management of both beneficial (early, frequency-balanced) and destructive (late, focusing) sound reflections using 3-D modeling. We finish with a discussion of test results, and end-user impressions concerning the intelligibility, and overall acoustic functionality of the theater.