Literature, theatre and cinema count many engineers, architects and musicians among its heroic and tragic characters. Rudyard Kipling’s The Bridge Builders dramatizes the engineering of a monumental bridge across the Ganges. In Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men, an architect saves an innocent boy from prison by persuading fellow jurors to agree on a not guilty verdict. Fictional musicians are too numerous to list.

So where are all of the acousticians in fiction? We, who bridge the worlds of engineering, architecture and music!

Arkady Apollonovich Sempleyarov

Sadly, the only fictional acoustician I’m aware of is Arkady Apollonovich Sempleyarov, the Chairman of the Acoustics Commission of Moscow Theatres in Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bugakov’s supernatural satire of Soviet society.

Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bugakov

Arkady Apollonovich’s appearance in the book is brief. He shows up in the audience of a magic show, where he heckles the magician, demanding he expose his tricks, and is then humiliated when another audience member exposes the acoustician’s own ‘magic trick’ with a touring actress. An argument breaks out Arkady Apollonovich ends up getting cracked on the head–twice–by an incensed relative’s “short, stubby, lilac umbrella.”

Bulgakov’s portrayal of Arkady Apollonovich is not particularly flattering. The character’s only function seems to be to embody the bloat of the Soviet bureaucracy and the corruption and pretensions of its minor functionaries. While the Acoustics Commission of Moscow Theatres was fictional, Master and Margarita archivist and commentator Jan Vanhellemont suspects Bulgakov based the organization on the Directorate for Theatre Enterprises belonging to the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment, a bureaucratic organization that controlled and censored the arts in the Soviet Union.

Are There Any Others?

Do you know of any other acousticians in literature, theatre, the cinema or other arts? Get in touch with me so I can update this post!