A measuring instrument for the auditory perception of rooms: The Room Acoustical Quality Inventory (RAQI)

Abstract

With the Room Acoustical Quality Inventory (RAQI), a measuring instrument for the perceptual space of performance venues for music and speech has been developed. First, a focus group with room acoustical experts determined relevant aspects of room acoustical impression in the form of a comprehensive list of 50 uni- and bipolar items in different categories. Then, n = 190 subjects rated their acoustical impression of 35 binaurally simulated rooms from 2 listening positions, with symphonic orchestra, solo trumpet, and dramatic speech as audio content. Subsequent explorative and confirmative factor analyses of the questionnaire data resulted in three possible solutions with four, six, and nine factors of room acoustical impression. The factor solutions, as well as the related RAQI items, were tested in terms of reliability, validity, and several types of measurement invariance, and were cross-validated by a follow-up experiment with a subsample of 46% of the original participants, which provided re-test reliabilities and stability coefficients for all RAQI constructs. The resulting psychometrically evaluated measurement instrument can be used for room quality assessment, acoustical planning, and the further development of room acoustical parameters in order to predict primary acoustical qualities of venues for music and speech.

Listener-Position and Orientation Dependency of Auditory Perception in an Enclosed Space: Elicitation of Salient Attributes

“…Similarly, a relationship between ASW and the sound pressure level was also acknowledged by Morimoto et.al [51]. A correlation between width, loudness and the source size was also reported by Weinzierl et al [15], supporting the hypothesis that ASW perception is indeed influenced by the sound strength. However, other studies in the context of concert hall acoustics confirmed the IACC Early and Lf as well as [1-IACC E3] (a.k.a.…”

“…Weinzierl et al [15], in a comprehensive study using computer simulations of multiple acoustic venues and various types of sound sources, developed an instrument aimed towards measuring the perception of performance spaces. A number of perceptual attributes were elicited from focus group discussions on audible differences among the concert halls.…”

“…However, the number of listening positions in each hall was limited to two. Whist the studies by Lokki et al [11] and Weinzierl et al [15] put emphasis on comparisons among different acoustic spaces, the present study focuses on the elicitation of perceptual attributes derived from comparing different positions within the same space.…”

Recognizing individual concert halls is difficult when listening to the acoustics with different musical passages

“…Previously, the ability to recognize different rooms by their acoustics has received very little attention, and in the authors' knowledge, there is no direct precedence for the current experiment. In the development of the room acoustic quality inventory, Weinzierl et al (2018) concluded that "…listeners are obviously able to identify the room and its acoustical properties as a consistent cognitive object." The current study has now put this abstract statement on an empirical basis, but according to the evidence here, the recognition of rooms by their acoustic properties seems to be rather elusive and approximate, especially when room acoustics are perceived in variable sound contexts.…”

Brightness perception for musical instrument sounds: Relation to timbre dissimilarity and source-cause categories

“…In singing voice pedagogy, the concept of chiaroscuro, or bright-dark tone, is central to the bel canto style, describing the ideal singing voice as having "a bright edge as well as a dark round quality in a complex texture of vocal resonances" (Stark, 2003, p. 33). Timbral brightness has also been shown to be an important factor in assessing concert hall acoustics (Lokki et al, 2011;Weinzierl et al, 2018). Despite the major role of brightness in music creation and perception, research has not yet delineated its detailed perceptual and cognitive structure.…”