Comparisons between room acoustics preferences of musicians and non-musicians regarding solo-instrument and orchestral motifs in auralizations

Abstract

Musicians are good candidates for room acoustics subjective testing since they regularly practice critical listening skills, but recent work suggests that non-musicians should also be included as the two groups may have diverse room acoustics preferences. A study was conducted to evaluate these two participant groups to ensure the representation of the entire population in room acoustics studies. The specific goal of the present work was to investigate preference differences between musicians and non-musicians in the evaluation of musical stimuli with varying reverberation time (RT). Preliminary data introduced at a prior meeting demonstrated that on average musicians and non-musicians displayed similar preference trends for auralizations of two solo-instrument motifs. However, a k-means clustering analysis revealed that a greater percentage of non-musicians exhibited statistically indistinct preference ratings across the stimuli, denoted as the “no preference” group. This result may indicate that non-mus...