Comparison of acoustic experience of studio recordings and live concerts

Abstract

It has been common in recent years to use recorded music in the investigation of subjective qualities of concert hall acoustics. The object of this paper is to compare experimental results from recorded music evaluations and live concert evaluations. A list of 54 opposite labels describing acoustic qualities of concert halls were used at the poles of bipolar rating scales in the evaluation of studio recordings. The raw judgments were analyzed by factor analysis and five independent factors were produced, namely body, clarity, tonal quality, extent, and proximity. The validity of these results was then tested in the environmental complexity of live concert conditions. To this end 27 scales were evolved to represent the previously obtained factors and were used at three live concert evaluations. Four to five independent factors were produced depending on the concert situation. Four of these factors, namely body, clarity, tonal quality, and proximity had also previously emerged; two factors which emerged only in the live concerts were spaciousness and intimacy [A. G. Sotiropoulou et al., Proc. Inst. Acoust., Edinburgh (1982)]. These results show that there are independent sets of acoustic qualities (factors) common to the studio recordings used in this study and to live concerts.