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The Castrato Voice and the Acoustics of the Baroque Opera HouseDuring the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European opera houses employed castrato singers whose artificially preserved high voices combined with adult male lung capacity. Although modern audiences often assume that these performers succeeded chiefly because of their unusual vocal range, recent acoustic studies suggest that the architecture of Baroque theatres amplified their voices in ways that would not occur in a modern concert hall. The horseshoe-shaped auditorium, lined with wooden panels and shallow boxes, reflected high-frequency sound efficiently, allowing a single unamplified singer to be heard above a full orchestra. This acoustic advantage, however, depended on conditions that proved fragile. As opera houses were enlarged and redesigned during the nineteenth century, upholstered seating and deeper stages absorbed the frequencies on which castrato voices relied. Composers gradually wrote roles for tenors and sopranos whose lower registers suited the new sonic environment. The decline of the castrato tradition, therefore, cannot be attributed solely to changing musical taste; it also reflected a transformation in the physical spaces where opera was performed.