THE ACOUSTICS OF FATRA HOUSE OF ARTS IN ZILINA, SLOVAKIA

In this article, we present a concert hall of The Fatra House of Arts in Zilina Slovakia, describe the hall itself and examine the acoustical quality of the hall. The concert hall primarily serves for symphony, chamber orchestra and soloist but hosts various cultural and social events as well. The hall is being considered as acoustically exquisite space by many professional musicians and conductors all around the world for a long time. However, real measurement of the objective acoustical quality parameters, that could confirm the subjective assessment, has never been carried out. We conducted the acoustic measurements following the ISO 3382 standard, which specifies methods for evaluating room acoustics using impulse response analysis. The measurements were performed using an omnidirectional sound source and an omnidirectional microphone to capture the room’s impulse responses at multiple receiver positions. From these responses, we assessed reverberation-based (reverberation time, early decay time), energy-based (clarity), spectral-based (bass ratio, treble ratio), and spatial impression-based (lateral energy fraction) objective criteria. The measured results of these parameters demonstrate a correlation with the recommended values found in specialized literature for chamber orchestra performances, with a reverberation time of 2 s, an early decay time of 1.57 s, a clarity of 0.8 dB, and an initial time delay gap of 12 ms.