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

Abstract

This article presents a listening experiment in which the listeners' task was to recognize the acoustics of a seat in a specific concert hall. Stimuli included two short passages extracted from a Beethoven symphony and samples of a solo violin auralized to four real concert halls. In each trial, listeners were presented with a reference and four alternatives with one correct match. In the "same" condition, the reference and the alternatives contained the same source sound. In the "different" condition, the source sounds were different musical passages but always of the same sound type, that is, symphonic music or solo violin. Results show that on average listeners could recognize the halls when the task was performed with the same source sound but had difficulty when listening to different sounds. The patterns of erroneous responses exhibited confusion between particular hall pairs and corresponded well to the values and just-noticeable-differences of the traditional objective room acoustic parameters. While the type of music is previously well known to influence the perception of concert hall acoustics, the present results indicate that even minor changes in the source sound content may have a strong impact on the ability to recognize the acoustics of individual halls. V

Assessing room acoustic listening expertise

“…Interestingly, perceptual and cognitive ability estimates derived from the two listening tests show very low and insignificant correlations among each other. This finding indicates that the two test paradigms indeed require fundamentally different abilities, confirming the previous findings suggesting that acoustical listening expertise is not a single skill but consists of several abilities (Kuusinen and Lokki, 2020). however, expertise in the perceptual assessment of room acoustic conditions can only be achieved by familiarization and specific training of all participants prior to the listening test, whereas self-reports and socio-demographic information represent rather unreliable indicators.…”

“…For instance, in a study by Kreimann et al (1990), clinical experts used different, individual strategies to identify dysphonia (a larynx malfunction that causes hoarse voice) in the vocal recordings compared to a sample of naive listeners who rather consistently relied on the voices' fundamental frequency. Also, a study by Kuusinen and Lokki (2020) observed that listening test participants benefited from acoustic expertise and experience in a discrimination task in which different room impulse responses were presented with the same source signal but not if the source signal also changed between the different stimuli.…”

“…In the iteration with the largest differences, one reverberation time was three times longer than the other. Because Kuusinen and Lokki (2020) already showed that comparing room responses with different source signals is considerably more difficult than with the same source signal, a minimal difference between the room responses, which was double as the threshold used in the perceptual sensitivity test, was considered sufficient.…”