It is a simple fact that, with the exclusion of those naturally gifted, to learn to play music requires practice – and lots of it. It is also a fact that most people do not like to hear people practising music – hence, at schools and universities, there are music practice rooms designed to isolate the people practising music from those who wish to stay reasonably sane.

These practice rooms are called – guess what? – music practice rooms and, in general, these have, in my experience, been designed by specially qualified fools who have no idea about music, teaching music, acoustics, noise isolation or how to retrieve apples from a bucket using one’s teeth, with one’s hands tied behind one’s back.

No, I made that last bit up. Bobbing for apples is quite likely what they can do. All they can do. As a very bad clarinet player and as an acoustics engineer, I can tell you that I have never, from grade school to university, been in a music practice room in this country, where the room even remotely is what is needed.

Let us start with the basics. Unless your room is located far away from everybody else, it should be designed in such a way that the music from within cannot be heard without. If this is the case, the window cannot or should not be opened. If this is the case, then the room has to be ventilated and, ideally, air-conditioned. Okay, I know air conditioning is not the most favourite thing of many music teachers, since it reeks of technology, and not music, but the fact is either no window and all too hot or open window and everybody hears or . . . aircon. Actually, it is possible to condition the air in the room without aircon . . . but conditioned it must be.

Next – the room itself. If a room is small (as are most music rooms), then it is important that the room does not resonate at certain frequencies. Simply put, the wavelength in air of the note ‘A’ is about 800 mm. If the room is 1 600 mm × 2 400 mm × 3 200 mm, then we will find that the A will be magnified to a great degree. This will cause the pupil playing in the room to underplay it. Similarly for other notes.

Further, if the room has many parallel reflecting surfaces, then the result will be that the music becomes very mixed up and no clear musical phrases are distinguishable. Thus, one finds the extraordinary situation where the pupil practises at home and does well and then, back at school, with the teacher, sounds like rubbish, since the music room is acoustically bad.

Things get worse with pianos in music rooms. Grand pianos (the flat ones) occupy space such that they never end up in rooms that are too small so they generally sound good. Upright pianos have a sounding board at the back. This board is, guess what, where much of the music comes from. Thus, if you shove the upright piano up against the wall in a small room, it is going to sound poor. Even worse, if it is tuned in the small room, it will probably be tuned off tune at higher frequencies owing to the influence off the room.

So, with all this, why do people (architects, it may be said) not seem to bother with room size, ventilation or even that most simple thing, a door that seals well, thus sentencing students to decades of practice hell? You know what . . . I guess nobody really thinks about it.