Assessing room acoustic listening expertise

Abstract

Musicians and music professionals are often considered to be expert listeners for listening tests on room acoustics. However, these tests often target acoustic parameters other than those typically relevant in music such as pitch, rhythm, amplitude, or timbre. To assess the expertise in perceiving and understanding room acoustical phenomena, a listening test battery was constructed to measure the perceptual sensitivity and cognitive abilities in the identification of rooms with different reverberation times and different spectral envelopes. Performance in these tests was related to data from the Goldsmiths Musical Sophistication Index, self-reported previous experience in music recording and acoustics, and academic knowledge on acoustics. The data from 102 participants show that sensory and cognitive abilities are both correlated significantly with musical training, analytic listening skills, recording experience, and academic knowledge on acoustics, whereas general interest in and engagement with music do not show any significant correlations. The regression models, using only significantly correlated criteria of musicality and professional expertise, explain only small to moderate amounts (11%-28%) of the variance in the "room acoustic listening expertise" across the different tasks of the battery. Thus, the results suggest that the traditional criteria for selecting expert listeners in room acoustics are only weak predictors of their actual performances.

Reverberation Time and Musical Emotion in Recorded Music Listening

“…Those who par�cipated received an average payment of £3.33 for a survey dura�on of approximately 20 minutes. Par�cipants were not selected for musical abili�es; note that there is only mixed evidence for musical experience impac�ng room acous�c sensi�vity (Lawless, 2018;von Berg et al, 2021). Approval was obtained from the Cambridge University Faculty of Music Ethics Subcommitee prior to recruitment.…”

Perceptual Matching of Room Acoustics for Auditory Augmented Reality in Small Rooms - Literature Review and Theoretical Framework

“…In contrast, for people who are not interested in the sound of cars, a quite rough approximation may perfectly fulfill their expectations and lead to an AAR experience they like. Similarly, room acousticians and sound engineers pay more attention to the details of room acoustics in their everyday lives and are more likely to notice inaccuracies in the reproduced room (von Berg et al, 2021). Another interesting group are blind people, who are often assumed to have better hearing capabilities than people with normal vision.…”

Sonic Interactions in Virtual Environments: The Egocentric Audio Perspective of the Digital Twin

“…More generally, the distinction between categories of listeners is still challenging and is made based on several factors such as multisensory calibration and integration (see Chap. 12 for audio-haptics), familiarity with immersive/spatial audio technologies, musical background [152], or audio mixing experience (as in Chap. 9), etc.…”