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Applicability of Common Room Acoustic Parameters for Music Recording Spaces in Recording Studios
(2025)
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.
Over the past decades, research in room acoustics has established several derivative measures of an impulse response, some of which are incorporated in the ISO 3382 standards. These parameters intend to represent perceptual qualities, but were developed without a consistent modeling of room acoustical perception. More recent research proposed comprehensive inventories of room acoustic perception that are purely based on evaluations by human subjects, such as the Room Acoustical Quality Index (RAQI). In this work RA-QI scores acquired for 70 room impulse responses were predicted from room acoustical parameters. Except for Reverberance, the prediction of RAQI factors performed rather poor. In most cases, the sound source had a greater impact on RAQI scores. All analyses are published in an online tool, where users can upload omnidirectional and binaural impulse responses, and instantly obtain and visualize several physical descriptors, as well as predicted RAQI scores for three different sound sources. So far, acceptable prediction accuracy is achieved for Reverberance, Strength, Irregular Decay, Clarity and Intimacy. Larger data sets of evaluated impulse responses are required to improve the model performance and enable reliable predictions of room acoustical quality. Therefore, the administration of RAQI evaluations within the website is currently being developed.
Der Aufführungsraum leistet einen substantiellen Beitrag zum Erleben von Musikdarbietungen. Zur Beschreibung der Akustik von Aufführungsräumen haben sich dabei zahlreiche Messgrößen etabliert, welche bestimmte Wahrnehmungsqualitäten, wie z. B. die Halligkeit, abbilden sollen. Dem stellt jüngere Forschung rein perzeptive Messinventare gegenüber, die den Wahrnehmungseindruck als solchen, losgelöst vom physikalischen Ursprung, beschreiben. Dieser Artikel beschreibt einen Versuch, diese beiden Forschungsrichtungen zusammenzuführen, indem Bewertungen von Aufführungsräumen nach dem perzeptiven Room Acoustical Quality Index (RAQI) durch physikalische Messgrößen modelliert wurden, welche aus einfachen Impulsantwortmessungen ermittelt werden. Dazu wurde eine Auswahl raumakustischer Messgrößen auf fünf Dimensionen reduziert und diese als Prädiktoren für die einzelnen Wahrnehmungsgrößen des RAQI getestet. Die Berechnung dieser Prädiktionsmodelle wird vorgestellt und deren Präzision diskutiert. Anschließend wird die OPRA-Webanwendung vorgestellt, die sowohl die Berechnung der raumakustischen Messgrößen als auch die Prädiktion von RAQI-Wahrnehmungsgrößen für die drei Quellsignale Sprache, Orchester und Solotrompete im Browser ermöglicht. Auch wenn die Präzision der Prädiktionsmodelle noch nicht für alle RAQI-Faktoren zuverlässige Ergebnisse liefert, erlaubt OPRA eine umfangreiche akustische Analyse und eine erste Einschätzung der perzeptiven Wirkung von Aufführungsräumen.
The perceived spatial impression is an important factor in the aesthetic appreciation of classical music recordings. Crucial aspects of spatial perception can be described by the attributes ensemble width, depth, envelopment, and reverberation duration. In a listening experiment, a sample of 30 experts rated 24 orchestra recordings by these attributes. To compare these ratings to signalrelated measures of spatial impression, an audio descriptor for the interaural cross-correlation coefficient in music recordings was chosen as a measure of perceived ensemble width. A second algorithm estimated the reverberation time from decay segments in the recorded music. Linear mixed-effects models were then used to test whether these two descriptors, combined with other audio features related to timbre, are suitable for predicting participants’ ratings of the perceptual attributes. Overall, results confirmed that the signal-related measures used can indeed predict perceptual attributes, with 41% of rating variance explained in the case of reverberation duration. In contrast, these objective measures turned out to be less accurate predictors of the perceived ensemble width, with a variance explanation of 21%. This study can thus be regarded as a starting point for further studies aiming to predict the perceived spatial impression in music recordings.
Background
Previous research has observed vast changes in musical preference during childhood and adolescence due to developmental processes such as the experience of aesthetic responses to music (Nieminen et al., 2012) and the formation and expression of social identity through distinct musical preferences (Hargreaves et al., 2016). Most of this research, however, is either based on the evaluation of musical pieces that have been previously selected by adult experimenters, or self-reports on preferences for different musical styles.
Aim(s)
This study presents another methodological approach by collecting and analysing music that was freely requested on a children’s radio show. The aim was to test to what extent findings from self-reports and ratings of pre-selected music apply to this kind of data.
Methods
A sample of 1412 freely and publicly expressed music requests of children between 4 and 11 years was taken from a German radio program and analysed with regard to age- and sex-specific differences. The music was categorized into genres as listed on Spotify and examined by methods of Music Information Retrieval provided by the Spotify Developer API. Additionally, the music was genre-independently classified as children’s music.
Results
Results showed that, at younger ages, the requests were generally more evenly distributed across different genres. Regarding single genres, logistic regression models revealed small positive relationships between age and the likelihood of requesting the genres Pop and Electro and small negative relationships between age and the likelihood of requesting Acapella, German songwriter, Indie, theme songs, and children's music. Furthermore, contingency table analyses showed that boys requested significantly more Rock and Hip Hop, whereas girls had a higher tendency to ask for Pop. Finally, age was negatively correlated with the Spotify features valence and liveness of the requested music, which was related to the higher preference for children’s music at younger ages.
Discussion and Conclusion
The results suggest that previous findings regarding musically expressed gender roles and increasing formation of distinct genre preferences during infancy also apply to single song requests made on a radio show.
References
Hargreaves, D. J., North, A. C., & Tarrant, M. (2016). How and why do musical preferences change in childhood adolescence. In G. McPherson (Ed.), The child as musician: A handbook of musical development (Second edition). Oxford University Press.
Nieminen, S., Istók, E., Brattico, E., & Tervaniemi, M. (2012). The development of the aesthetic experience of music: Preference, emotions, and beauty. Musicae Scientiae, 16(3), 372–391. https://doi.org/10.1177/1029864912450454
The Lombard Effect and its impact on human speech production, also known as ‘Lombard Speech’, have been investigated in numerous scientific studies. It is known that the intensity, but also the type of background noise can affect Lombard Speech. By contrast, the potential effect of a gradual reduction of the amplitude of the background noise has received little attention in previous research. To test for such an effect, we split 34 participants into couples and had them orally compare images. In the experimental condition, there was background noise (masker) whose amplitude was reduced from 70 to 50 dB(A) over a period of 100 seconds. Measures of speech production after this decay were compared to those of a reference condition in which the masker was constantly at 50 dB(A). We hypothesized that speech production due to prior exposure to a louder masker would show a stronger expression of Lombard Speech in the experimental compared to the reference condition. The results showed a significant difference regarding the level of the first formant F1 across conditions, but not regarding the overall dB(A) level. However, tendencies could be identified, which can serve as a basis for further investigations.
Noise sensitivity is a widely used, yet inconsistently defined, concept of being disturbed by environmental noise, independent of loudness levels. The origins of noise sensitivity are mostly unclear, but it has a higher prevalence among people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and autism, and could be caused by increased neural excitation due to sound, resulting in increased cognitive load. In this case, noise sensitivity can be expected to decrease people’s mental performance in both auditory and non-auditory tasks. The former was tested in an experiment using a dual-task paradigm where participants had to solve a visual task in the presence of environmental sounds and afterwards had to recall which sounds they perceived and to evaluate the overall soundscape pleasantness and loudness. Preliminary results indicate that participants’ noise sensitivity is positively correlated with the experienced cognitive load as well as with loudness and unpleasantness judgments. Also, noise sensitivity was negatively associated with the performance in the recall task and the test-retest-reliability of their judgments. These findings support the idea that noise sensitivity is a consequence of difficulties in filtering irrelevant auditory information.