J. Christopher Jaffe has been a consultant in acoustics for half a century. With a background in engineering, theater, and music, he has designed concert halls and symphonic music pavilions for dozens of America’s top orchestral ensembles, including the New York Philharmonic, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the National Symphony. Noted for his innovative design concepts, starting with the Stagecraft Orchestral Shell (developed with Boris Goldovsky, director of the Tanglewood Opera Theatre) in 1959, Jaffe also developed the tunable/coupled orchestra shell, the concert hall shaper, and the “Cab Forward” design approaches to multiuse concert facilities described in this book. He has worked with many of America’s most talented theater architects, including Philip Johnson, I. M. Pei, Frank O. Gehry, Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates, Rafael Vinoly, and David Schwarz. When not consulting for Acentech Inc, he divides his time between his home in Connecticut and a camp on Loon Lake in the Adirondack Mountains. Most recently he won the 2011 Acoustical Society of America's Wallace Clement Sabine Medal for his efforts to further the knowledge of architectural acoustics.