Listener's quality in subjective evaluation of concert hall acoustics: Comparison between musical experts' and students' judgment of reverberance for solo music

This paper studies whether there is a difference in subjective judgments between musical experts and non-experts regarding the preferred reverberation time and clarity of concert halls based on a psychoacoustic test. The test signals were piano and violin solos convoluted with binaural room impulse responses measured at 34 positions in 18 symphonic halls. Experts consisted of outstanding musicians, music managers, recording engineers, and acousticians. They all had listening experience in many halls listed here. Non-experts were students who had more extended musical training than ordinary ones. The preferred reverberation time at mid-frequencies (average of 500 Hz and 1,000 Hz) obtained for piano and violin were 1.2 to 2.0 s and 1.8 to 2.4 s for the experts, and 0.9 to 2.1 s and 1.6 to 2.7 s for the non-experts. The latter resulted in a 50% and 83% broader range of judgments for piano and violin, respectively. Clarity showed a similar tendency. This result indicates that the subjective judgment by musical experts is more reliable than non-experts when designing actual concert halls.