Room measurement setup for accurate objective analysis and realistic subjective comparison of concert halls

Abstract

When measuring a concert hall, a primary goal is to characterize the perceptual aspects of the room’s quality. Since subjective testing requires extensive time and resources, halls are often compared using objective metrics designed to correlate with perception. The goal of the present work is to create a concert hall measurement database that allows for both accurate objective and realistic subjective assessment of concert halls. A 32-element spherical microphone array is used to capture a spatial room impulse response (SRIR) within a hall. A three-way omnidirectional sound source is used for objective measurements, exhibiting omnidirectional behavior up to 5kHz. The omnidirectional SRIR can be used to calculate typical room acoustic metrics and analyzed using beamforming techniques. For a realistic auralization that resembles an orchestral performance, an alternate sound source was used: a compact 20-element spherical loudspeaker. This loudspeaker can be moved around a stage and the measurement signal c...