Concert hall acoustic criteria; subjective significance

Abstract

The validity of current physical room acoustic criteria developed by various authors in the laboratory has been tested for the first time under the environmental complexity of live concerts. Six independent subjective factors emerged from evaluations on semantic rating scales, namely body, clarity, tonal quality, proximity, spaciousness, and intimacy. In a correlation analysis between subjective factors and measured values of physical room acoustic parameters, the factors clarity and intimacy were not found to be related with any of the physical parameters. The factor body correlated with the ratio of 80-ms Late-to-Early energy, tonal quality with the texture of the impulse response decay, and proximity with the direct-to-reverberant energy ratio and distance from platform. Each of the factors body, tonal quality, and proximity were also found to be the effect of an additional objective influence which remained unidentified [A. G. Sotiropoulou, Ph.D. thesis, University of London (1982)]. These results show that there is redundancy in current physical room acoustic criteria, and that the list of physical criteria which account for good acoustics is still incomplete. [Thanks go to Dr. David B. Fleming for invaluable advice.]

Finding the Seat With the Best View: Stage-View Preference for Orchestra

“…Reverberation parameters such as T 30 , T 20 , or EDT, and acoustic clarity parameters such as C 80 , D 50 , or T s , are also found to affect auditory preference. Furthermore, because reverberation and clarity parameters usually change in opposition, they are believed to have optimal ranges for certain spaces (Ando, 2010(Ando, , 2014Bagenal & Wood, 1931;Farina, 2001;Knudsen, 1932;Kocher & Vigeant, 2015;Schroeder et al, 1974;Sotiropoulou et al, 1995;Soulodre & Bradley, 1995).…”

“…Various spatial parameters have been found to affect auditory spatial impression, which is important for auditory preference (Choisel & Wickelmaier, 2006Kocher & Vigeant, 2015;Sotiropoulou et al, 1995), such as early lateral energy fraction (J LF or J LFC ), an indicator for apparent source width (ASW; Barron, 1971;Barron & Marshall, 1981;Keet, 1968;Marshall & Barron, 2001), late lateral sound level (L J ), an indicator for listener envelopment (LEV; Bradley & Soulodre, 1995a, 1995bMorimoto, 1989), and interaural cross-correlation coefficient (IACC; Ando, 1977Ando, , 1982Ando, , 2010Ando, , p. 20, 2014Ando & Gottlob, 1979;Hidaka et al, 1992Hidaka et al, , 1995Okano et al, 1998;Schroeder et al, 1974).…”

“…When comparing between different auditoria, auditory preference was commonly found to be positively related to sound strength or loudness of the auditorium (Beranek, 1992;Y. Chen & Cabrera, 2021;Farina, 2001;Ryu & Jeon, 2008;Sotiropoulou et al, 1995), so long as it does not exceed the optimal listening level of around 79 dB(A) (Ando, 2010(Ando, , 2014.…”