Undergraduate Student: Acadia Kocher

The goal of this project was to better understand the three subjective attributes of reverberance, listener envelopment, and tonal quality and determine if each of these attributes related to a listeners overall preference. Using binaural recordings techniques, stimuli from three different musical motifs were recorded at three receiver locations for two different variable acoustic hall conditions at the Belding Theater, a 900-seat multipurpose hall in Hartford, CT. The musical excerpts included a solo cello motif, and orchestral passages by Bizet and Mozart. The recordings were presented over electrostatic headphones, and subjects were asked to rate each of the passages at each receiver location and hall setting in terms of their perceived reverberance, listener envelopment, and tonal quality, along with their overall preference.

All 3 attributes were found to be positively correlated with overall preference ratings when evaluated across all of the stimuli; however, the ratings of the 3 attributes were not found to be independent. A partial correlation analysis was done to separate the overlap in variances between the ratings of the attributes. The results were found to vary by motif. Tonal quality was the best indicator of overall preference for the solo cello excerpt, reverberance for the Bizet excerpt, and listener envelopment for the Mozart excerpt. These results agree with previous findings that all 3 of these attributes are significantly related to overall preference.

Project Publications:

• Kocher, A.A. and Vigeant, MC. (2015). “Relationships between room acoustic quality and reverberance, listener envelopment, and tonal quality.” [invited submission; technical report] Psychomusicology: Music, Mind, and Brain 25(3):331-338
• Kocher, A.A. and Vigeant, M.C. (2014). “Investigation of subjective components of overall acoustic quality using binaural recordings made in Hartford’s Belding Theater (A).” J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 135:2398