The new medium-sized hall of the Muziekgebouw aan het IJ has been built for a wide range of symphonic, classical and contemporary music. The concert hall is very innovative and flexible, with floors, ceilings, chairs and stage walls being movable and with a dense lighting grid and LED lit walls. The different types of uses demanded a significant level of natural acoustic variation in terms of volume as well as reverberation time. The ceilings consists of three parts, all are movable over 6 m height. The hall, made as a box-in-box structure to eliminate exterior noise (boats, trains, planes) has very low background noise levels (10 dB(A)).
In the design phase Peutz used an acoustical 1:16 scale model to test the new concept. Several acoustically significant elements of the hall, like the walls and the chairs, were also tested at 1:1 scale in Peutz' laboratories. The halls widely praised acoustic is very clear and transparent but also reverberant and spacious. The acoustic success is largely due to its shoe box shape and proper dimensioning, the two narrow side balconies and the carefully chosen diffusivity and texture of the walls and ceilings.