Evaluating acoustical qualities of four rooms using questionnaires

Abstract

A large group of students listened to anechoic recordings of music and speech samples at several locations in four different performance rooms: a large 2000‐seat multipurpose performing arts center; a black box theater; a 250‐seat lecture hall; and an open field. A brief piece by Mozart played by a string quartet, a portion of a symphony by Bruckner, a soliloquy from Hamlet, and standard speech intelligibility word lists were played through a single loudspeaker located at the center front of the performing area of the room. Students evaluated qualities of sound including clarity, intimacy, envelopment, balance, reverberance, loudness, and overall impression on a bi‐polar semantic rating scale. They also took speech intelligibility tests. The overall impression of the pieces of music in the black box theater and the lecture hall were scored higher than the other two rooms. There were significant differences in the ratings of the different musical pieces in all rooms. The ratings in the outdoor tests were consistently less than those in all of the indoor locations by over two scale points illustrating the importance of room effects. The ratings in the performing arts center for the recorded music were significantly lower than ratings obtained at the same locations by a group of students evaluating live orchestral performances in the room. [Work supported by NSF.]