No abstract

Psychoacoustic research in the field of concert halls has revealed that many aspects concerning listening perception have yet to be totally understood. On the one hand, the objective room acoustics of performance spaces are reflected in parameters, some standardized and some not, but these are related to a limited number of perceptual attributes of human response. In general, these objective parameters cannot accurately Secondly, hierarchical clustering produces the classification of survey questions in 7 hierarchical classes. On the other hand, a lack of tuning between objective parameters and perceptual responses is observed on applying MDS analysis to the ordination of the venues from a subjective assessment and a subjective-objective assessment. Finally, although the results show the mismatch between objective parameters and subjective responses, a model of subjective global evaluation of the acoustics of the room from data of three orthogonal acoustic parameters is implemented, revealing a reasonably good fit.

In recent years we have interviewed members of the audience after musical performances and asked them to evaluate the acoustics of the concert halls. A group of 'music lovers' (with a high level of musical training and experience) and 'acousticians' (with a wide knowledge of the physical characteristics of sound transmission) also attended each performance and answered the same questions as the general public. This group thereby served as a control group when evaluating surveys of the general public. In this paper, the results obtained when analyzing these control group surveys are presented. This analysis shows that a common vocabulary exists between music lovers and acousticians when rating a hall, although the grouping of the questions for each factor depends on the training of the respondents.

The antiinflammatory activity of twelve medicinal plants used against skin disorders were tested in different experimental models of topical inflammation and one in vitro inhibitory test against phospholipase A2 (PLA2) from Naja naja venom. Forsythia suspensa was the most active species on the arachidonic acid (AA) topical test. This last species together with Astragalus membranaceus and Ranunculus sceleratus were the most active on the 12‐O‐tetradecanoylphorbol‐13‐acetate (TPA) acute ear oedema test. Scrophularia auriculata was the most active on multiple topical applications of TPA and on the oxazolone‐induced delayed type hypersensitivity (DTH). Santolina chamaecyparissus was the only species that inhibited PLA2 in vitro. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The present paper examines the historical evolution of the concert halls acoustic parameters, in the international field. From the beginnings of twentieth century, the acoustic parameters have had a continuous evolution, covering more and more aspects of the concert hall acoustics qualification. Since the bibliography about these is fragmented, we performed in this article, a global and updated presentation on the chronology and the evolution of the studied parameters. Considering the great variety of the same, we presents the appearance of each parameter, located in decades, who has proposed them and, where is possible, indicates articles or publications where they have been presented for the first time. Thus, the historical presentation of the majority of the acoustic parameters of concert halls, it optimizes and can be useful for future research as a central platform in a bibliographical study. The presentation of the same is also grouped according to quality criteria.