The perceptual evaluation of acoustical environments II: Natural environments

Abstract

The perceptual evaluation of natural acoustic environments requires an assessment of the “room acoustical impression.” After some theoretical considerations on the nature of this perceptional construct and the shortcomings of existing tools, we present a new, empirically substantiated approach for the development of a corresponding measuring instrument. It relies crucially on the room acoustical simulation of a representative pool of acoustical environments for speech and music and their auralization for different acoustical sources. The resulting room acoustical quality inventory, together with a database of room acoustical models and their monaural and binaural transfer functions, can be used as a ground truth for room acoustical analysis and perception.