| Title |
Musician Evaluation of the Acoustic Quality of Rooms for Music |
| Abstract |
For many years auditorium acoustics research has been hampered by the lack of a suitable subjective assessment method. Opinions on the acoustics of a space depend on many factors besides its acoustic properties and so it is difficult to get reliable/useful information on which to base design criteria. This paper is aimed at developing a more quantifiable and repeatable method of assessing the acoustics of rooms for music performance. The idea is to see whether the perception of small changes in acoustic signals in rooms correlate with subjective impressions and objective measures of acoustical performance.Speech intelligibility testing can be undertaken to investigate the suitability of rooms for speech but there is no musical equivalent. This paper adopts the psychoacoustical methodology to evaluate the acoustical qualities of rooms and describes some of the results of an attempt to develop such a test. Pairs of sounds having differences in duration were presented to a subject and the subjects responses were recorded. The stimuli were varied in their waveform through a digital signal processor which simulated different rooms and reverberation times. An experiment was also undertaken to investigate how musicians perform the duration in contexts of music in an anechoic chamber. It was found that duration discrimination was influenced by the room conditions and that these discrimination procedures may form the basis for room acoustics assessments. |