Quality reverberation fields for organ music

Abstract

Organists and organ builders commonly specify a long reverberation time for a room for an organ. This simple quantitative statement ignores consideration of a larger specification required to insure appropriate quality of the reverberant field to insure that music heard has acceptable clarity, intimacy, diffusion, and other attributes required for excellent completion of the musical sound. Measurements other than reverberation time are examined to establish the role they should play in an adequate specification for a reverberant field for organ music. The acoustics of several rooms with large organs will be compared to illustrate the importance of these newer measures of acoustic quality in a more complete description of the rooms.