Comparison of listener preference in concert halls from the stage and the audience

The perception of concert hall acoustics has been studied extensively from the perspective of the audience, but less extensively from the perspective of the musicians performing on stage. In this study, impulse response measurements were conducted in a group of eight concert and recital halls in the northeastern United States. A multi-channel microphone array was used to measure listening positions both on the stage and in the audience. The impulse responses recorded with the microphone array were used to generate auralizations for playback over multi-channel loudspeaker arrays, to investigate listeners’ and musicians’ preferences via listening tests. The audience positions were presented to the test subjects via static, pre-convolved auralizations. For the stage positions, all test subjects were musicians who, during the course of the test, performed on their instruments and heard the resulting auralizations from the stages of the different concert halls, generated in real-time. The results allowed for a comparison of listener preferences from the stage and audience positions in the same set of halls. The microphone array recordings also allowed for spatial energy analysis and the development of new spatial room impulse response parameters that could be correlated with listeners’ preference judgments.