A

Seeking differences between architects' and acousticians' concert hall assessments

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol. 160, pp. 1971–1984

Abstract

By auditory and visual assessment, we investigate whether architects and acousticians describe their perception of concert hall acoustics in the same language. Four concert halls were represented in controlled in virtual reality environments. A total of 43 participants (23 acousticians, 20 architects-all with experience and interest in concert hall acoustics) participated in the experiment. During the experiment, all the participants were exposed to audio and video excerpts in two different positions across the four concert halls. An individual vocabulary profiling method (IVP) was used to collect the participants' attributes and textual ratings of the virtual spaces. The data were further analyzed via hierarchical multiple factorial analysis. The results reveal significant distinctions in the perceptual vocabulary and evaluation strategies employed by the two groups of professions, quantifying the perceptual dimensions without consensus vocabulary. They reveal a quasi-bidimensional perception space on architects using visual attributes and on acousticians using auditory attributes, but a higher perception space for the inverse modalities. Finally, the correlation between subjective and objective acoustical parameters reveals discrepancies between both expert groups on which objective parameter correlates with subjective balance and timbre, while it shows agreement for other subjective parameters.

Authors 5

  1. Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya · Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics

    Affiliation as printed

    Fraunhofer-Institute for Building Physics IBP 2 , Nobelstrasse 12, Stuttgart, 70569

    Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya 1 Department of Architectural Representation, , Avinguda Diagonal 649, Barcelona, 08028

  2. RWTH Aachen University

    Affiliation as printed

    Institute for Hearing Technology and Acoustics, RWTH Aachen University 3 , Kopernikustrasse 5, Aachen, 52074

  3. Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics

    Affiliation as printed

    Fraunhofer-Institute for Building Physics IBP 2 , Nobelstrasse 12, Stuttgart, 70569

  4. Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya

    Affiliation as printed

    Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya 1 Department of Architectural Representation, , Avinguda Diagonal 649, Barcelona, 08028

  5. RWTH Aachen University

    Affiliation as printed

    Institute for Hearing Technology and Acoustics, RWTH Aachen University 3 , Kopernikustrasse 5, Aachen, 52074

Cited by 0 stored of 0

No patents citing this paper on Lens.org (checked 2026-10-06).

References 22