Standardized concert hall acoustics metrics have known technical limitations compared to human perception

Evidence

In practice, the perception of concert hall acoustics has traditionally been estimated with the analysis of measured impulse responses. Different metrics have been proposed (Barron, 1993; Beranek, 1996), and a set of measurements has also been standardized (ISO 3382-1, 2009), some of which are discussed below. The measurements discussed here are only a representative subset of the complete set in the standard. The standard proposes that the acoustics of a hall can be described with a few measurements obtained by spatially averaging over several positions. Many aspects of the standard have been criticized: the algorithms to compute the parameters are imprecise the applied frequency range is too narrow compared to human perception; and a single omnidirectional source is an inadequate representation of the sound sources present in a real orchestra (Bradley, 2011; Kirkegaard and Gulsrud, 2011). Furthermore, an impulse response is only a technical measure and does not represent how a human perceives the response of the hall to continuous instrument sounds or voices. — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 2473

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: what alternative methods are being proposed to overcome the omnidirectional-source and frequency-range limits of ISO 3382-1?
• XREF: Connects to Chapter 16/17 themes of auditory models versus physical measurements, and to the book’s running tension between objective metrics and subjective listening.