Study on perception of difference in acoustic conditions in auditorium

To acoustically categorize audience seats of a music hall, it is necessary to discriminate acoustic conditions of the seats. The purpose of this study is to clarify the tendency of perception of acoustic difference among impulse responses collected at various seat positions. In the experiment, subjects listened to a pair of impulse responses collected in advance in the audience area, and then made a subjective evaluation concerning their acoustic perception on a five-point scale. The subjective evaluation values obtained from the subjects were plotted by multi-dimensional scaling (MDS) for comparison in the distance between the plotted coordinates to find the degree of perceptible difference in acoustic conditions. In the comparison throughout the whole area of the hall, the difference in acoustic conditions was found to be more perceptible in the case of binaural impulse response than the case of monaural impulse response, because the plotted coordinates distributed more widely in the former case. As a result of cluster analysis of the subjective evaluation, the plotted results were roughly polarized into two groups: a group of stage-side seats and a group of the other seats, from the viewpoint of similarity.