Subjective experiment on preferable reverberation of a musical practice room by professional players

Abstract

A musical practice room is very important space for players to improve their skills. However, no architectural design guideline of the musical practice room exists in Japan and the individual room is being designed based on architect's intuition and experiences. For a basic investigation aiming to establish the guideline, we are now investigating appropriate acoustic conditions of musical practice rooms for players by subjective experiments. In this study, we focused on reverberation time of the room and subjective experiments using a three dimensional sound field simulation were conducted for professional players including woodwind instrument players, string players and singers. In the experiment, a room having 6 conditions of reverberation time was virtually simulated in the sound field simulation system established in an anechoic chamber. As a result, a clear tendency of preferable reverberation time dependent on the difference of types of the instruments was found and a range of preferred reverberation time for a practice room was obtained.