Musical perception within a highly reverberant room

Abstract

The listening of a musical composition generates a unique and different perception in every listener, but, at the same time, the specific acoustic conditions of the room chosen for its performance have a decisive influence in that perception, which can fit in, almost completely, with the acoustic qualification of the room. The aim of this work is to find out how the high reverberance of a room can have a strong influence on the perception of a musical composition. For that aim, the St. Peter's church (in Cuenca, Spain) with a circular plan, a reduced volume and a high reverberance time has been chosen for the performance. A musical composition for voice and electroacoustics has been created specifically for this church. This has been recorded within the church using a HATS in the listener position and a set of music experts have been asked a survey about their impressions on perception after listening the recording using headphones. The results of the psychoacoustic analysis reveal that the high reverberance of this church leads to an extremely low intelligibility and an unclear sound of the recording. This, together with an unbereable background noise, gives a general acoustic perception not very attractive.