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Bill Dohn, a proud papa, settles back in his seat in the Paul Shaghoian Concert Hall at the new Clovis Unified Performing Arts Center and listens to his baby speak its first word.

For an acoustical consultant, a job title that requires you to spend years in the design stage making the sound in a building the best it can be, there comes a moment when you finally get to hear the finished product. The theory, the architectural tweaks, the computer simulations -- all those hours spent trying to imagine what a choir will sound like from the stage, say -- suddenly become a test in real time. A couple of dozen ninth-graders from the Clovis North High School Mixed Choir stood last week on risers. The golden tones of Schubert's "Kyrie Eleison," led by director Heather Bishop, ring throughout the hall. The stage, bathed in an intense white light that accentuates the warm-hued, wood-dominated color palette, transforms these children. They are no longer just a motley group of high-school freshmen. In this moment, they are performers.

"Beautiful," Dohn says simply of the moment.

Everything about this building on the new Clovis North Educational Center campus is designed to make these singers sound as good as possible, even the walls, with their acoustically engineered curves and intriguing pyramid shapes.

"Even the applause sounds good in this building," says Brent Moser, visual and performing arts director for the Clovis district. This impromptu morning concert for the building's creative design team isn't actually the first time anyone's ever sung from this stage. Eager musicians from the Clovis school district have been sneaking into the new center for weeks and trying out the sound.

And who can blame them? The $17.5 million facility, which will be shared by all the schools in the district, is a spectacular space for musical performances -- especially for a school. (Though the final test for the sound quality won't come until a full ensemble is on stage and an audience in the seats, preliminary indications from last week are promising.)

"It's probably the most impressive facility of its kind west of the Mississippi," says project architect Michael Fennacy, whose Darden Architects firm designed the building. For members of the general public, the "how" behind what its designers hope will be a phenomenal sound isn't as important as the sound itself. But for someone like Dohn, who does this for a living, the real story is the special features of the building that are designed to contribute to the acoustics. Here are his Top 10:

The stage canopy. Overhead, a grill with 20 sound reflecting "clouds" made of reinforced fiberglass provide sound reflection both to the performers and the audience. The apparatus has the ability to be raised and lowered and also to tilt at an angle depending on the type of music being performed.

The volume of the space. Ever wonder why concert halls are so tall? You need lots of room for the sound to fill. This achieves a higher reverberation time so that sound lingers as long as possible when you want it to (when you're presenting a choir or orchestra, say.)

The shoe-box shape of the building. Like the height, the rectangular form allows the sound to spread.

The heaviness of the materials. You might not realize it just from looking at the hall, but everything you see -- from the thickness of the walls to the multiple layers of gypsum bond -- is heavy-duty. If you were able to weigh this building, it'd break the scale. The result is that you don't lose the sound's energy, but instead reflect it back to the audience.

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