Concert Hall Acoustics Assessment With Sensory Evaluation - Tools and Practices

The acoustics of concert halls is also heavily influenced by a matter of taste. Therefore, sensory evaluation methods are very useful for studying auditorium acoustics due to their ability to extract information often hidden behind preference judgements. With such methods the sensory profiles of concert halls or profiles of seats inside one concert hall can be formed. Lorho1 has presented a classification of measurement methods which position the sensory evaluation methods with regard to the well know traditional methods, see Fig. 1. The classification can be adapted to acoustics evaluation as follows. In a concert hall the stimulus is symphonic music or an impulse response. The measurement devices are microphones and microphone arrays or the human listeners. In the physical domain, the room acoustical parameters are derived from impulse responses to give highly objective results. On the other hand, in the affective domain preference judgements might give an overall average picture, but the variance in the data is typically large due to the differences in personal taste and previous experiences of the assessors. Sensory evaluation methods provide a link between these domains enabling profiling of the halls with perceptual characteristics. Such profiles are useful to interpret physical measurement data and can help to explain the preference ratings.