P&J Live Arena

Aberdeen, UK

P&J Live is a 15,000-capacity arena in the Bucksburn district of Aberdeen. Since its opening in 2019, the Aberdeen City Council-owned venue has attracted a host of big-name performers, from Rod Stewart to Lewis Capaldi.

P&J Live is a 15,000-capacity arena that has brought a host of big-name acts to Aberdeen since opening in 2019.

Our acoustic experts were engaged to provide consultancy around the performance of sound within the arena and the adjoining exhibition and conference centre.

We worked to ensure the music did not “reflect” or echo back to the musicians on stage.

Our team also advised on the design to ensure noise did not escape the building and disturb local residents.

Challenge

Vanguardia, a Buro Happold company, was engaged by the developer, HBD, to provide expert consultancy around acoustics performance for the venue both in order to ensure that internally the sounds met the performers’ and audience’s expectations, and externally – to ensure that there is no acoustics egress, mitigating against the risk of loud music escaping to disturb local residents and those staying in nearby hotels.

The arena itself has been designed to be adaptable and to work with different types of performances. Seating can be moved to accommodate different styles of entertainment – for example ice skating shows require a very different seating formation to a staged rock concert. The acoustic performance of the venue would need to be sufficiently flexible to be able to adapt to these sorts of changes of mode.

We were also engaged to provide acoustic design consultancy for the adjoining exhibition and conference centre.  

Solution

Our experts created a dynamic digital model of the arena, based on the architect’s designs, using specialist software platforms EASE and CATT Acoustics. We were able to then experiment with how sounds performed within the space. A key consideration was mitigating against undue reverberation and to prevent acoustic reflection – when sounds reflect off structural elements to echo back at the performers on stage.

Mitigations against acoustic reflection included designing-out any big flat surfaces from the interior of the arena, which could create this acoustic reflection phenomenon. This involved ensuring a flat acoustic frequency response across the whole space, with interventions through the introduction of acoustically absorbent materials such as specialist curtains and baffles. This also involved advising on the acoustic absorbency of chosen seating materials as well as working closely with building services engineering contractors to ensure their interventions worked within the acoustic design.

A similar approach was taken for the exhibition and conference centre, with a focus on controlling reverberation times in order to ensure speeches are intelligible during large scale conferences, as well as working to keep acoustics intimate in what is a very large internal space.

Our experts returned to the completed arena and conference centre after construction had completed to commission the spaces – playing instruments on stage at different volumes to study the acoustic performance and make any tweaks as necessary to the baffles and acoustic curtains. We also informed the design team around acoustic isolation – ensuring against noise break-out from the venue by considered input to the specifications for structural materials and the design of the roof and exterior walls. This was critical to ensure a successful journey through the planning process for the project, fully establishing that performances will not disturb local residents.

Value

Our experts provided critical insight into a range of acoustic elements for the project and played a key role in ensuring that the new venue would quickly develop a reputation as a high-quality performance space and attract a broad range of acts to visit the city. Our team was able to offer detailed advice and design expertise, informed by an in-depth understanding of the challenges and broad experience of working on similar arena projects around the world.