An Objective Scheme for Ranking Halls and Obtaining Criteria for Improvements and Design

Abstract

[EN] Producing a formal means for ranking the quality of concert halls requires that the subjective assessment by experts and listeners be matched to acoustic parameters. Using previous results from Ando and Beranek, the authors propose a statistical scheme to obtain a function that fits the objective experimental data from 17 performance halls, which vary in uses, sizes, building types, and acoustics. Of the many possible acoustic parameters available, it appears that most of them can be reduced to LEV (listener envelopment), RTmid (mid frequency reverberation time), and LFCE4 (early lateral energy fraction). The obtained model based on these parameters, allows for designing and improving performance spaces.