(ProQuest: ... denotes formulae omitted)When designing rooms for performance or rehearsing of classical music, listening to and understanding musicians' needs and preferences is of crucial importance for achieving a successful result. The first comprehensive study including musicians' opinions about room acoustics was carried out by Leo Beranek as part of his preparation for the design of Philharmonic Hall in New York. Beranek interviewed (among others) 23 notable musicians about their evaluation of existing concert halls around the world. Beranek's results were published in his book, Music, Acoustics and Architecture in 1962 with the latest edition being (Beranek, 2004). For more than half a century, this book has been a major corner stone in the architectural acoustics literature. Another study on musician's opinions about room acoustics was carried out as part of the author's PhD study back in the 1980s (Gade, 1981). Extensive interviews with 32 experienced, professional musicians- conductors, soloists, and orchestra players-were conducted in the attempt to provide a vocabulary for description of musicians' room acoustic experiences. A summary can be found in (Gade, 1989). Also, Meyer (1994) gives valuable insight into the acoustic needs of musicians based on many years of research and his own practical experience as a musician. More recently, Dammerud (2009) has conducted a comprehensive study on stage acoustics in concert halls which also gives a deep insight into the room acoustic aspects experienced by orchestra musicians. Even after several decades of research and consulting in this field, the author still believes that the subjective aspects-or subjective parameters-contained in the literature mentioned above cover what most musicians experience as the important factors relating to the acoustics of the rooms they play in. In the following, these parameters will be written in italic.Since the 1970s, many attempts have been made also to find objective parameters, which can provide a quantitative evaluation of some of the subjective acoustic parameters of concern to musicians when they play-and listen-in concert and rehearsal halls. The obvious goal is to be able to evaluate through measurement and to predict through calculation using 3D models the acoustic quality of such rooms. An overview of the journey toward this goal-as of 2010-was described in a paper presented at the International Symposium on Room Acoustics in Melbourne (Gade, 2010).However, the scope of this article is different. We will not dwell on objective sound field properties or acoustic measurements, but rather elaborate on musician's ways of expressing their room acoustic experience and how they often associate this with the design features they see in halls or rehearsal rooms.For the acoustician, it is often a dilemma to handle musician's views on room design, as these are often related to metaphors or associations based on nonacoustic experience rather than on physical causation, and sometimes this may lead to conflicts in opinion that challenge the diplomatic skills of the acoustician. The dilemma here is that the musician knows best what he feels while the acoustician should know more about physics and psycho acoustics. That is also why the best dialogue is often established if the acoustician has some musical experience and the musician has some technical interest.Subjective Acoustic Aspects Noted by MusiciansThe first room acoustic aspect most musicians notice when entering a hall or rehearsal room is the degree of Reverberance or Fullness, and this quality seems to remain the most important acoustic feature to soloists. Like most acoustically conscious lis- teners, musicians notice the complementary property to Reverberance being Clarity. When Reverberance is excessive, the sound is unclear, wet, boomy, muddy, and often too loud, while it is normally easy to distinguish each note and the individual instruments in rooms with high Clarity and modest Reverberance. …
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Nov 7, 2023
Yuan Liu + 2
Open Access