Influence of Room Acoustics on Choir Singing 2

Multitrack recordings of a mixed adult choir with 23 singers were collected in order to investigate the influence of varied room acoustical conditions on a choir’s performance with regard to intonation, loudness, tempo, and timing precision. Headset microphones were used to record each chorister separately while the collected sound of all singers was presented via headphones exerting acoustic simulations of rooms with different reverberation times of 0.0 (bypass), 1.77 and 4.79 s according to three singing conditions. The choir was asked to sing “Locus Iste” by Anton Bruckner (1824-1896). Objective measures were obtained from single audio track analyses using the monophonic pitch tracker pYIN plugin for Sonic Visualiser. These revealed that intonation was barely affected by simulated room acoustics whereas tempo was notably slower and timing precision declined in the condition where participants sang in a comparatively large virtual room. Subjective judgments gathered by a questionnaire inquiring on the singers’ experiences showed a clear preference for singing in the medium sized “Concertgebouw” (with reverberation time = 1.77 s), while the dry acoustical condition (bypass) was felt to be the best to sing in time. The significance of these results and their relationships to other musical and acoustical parameters are discussed. PACS number(s): 43.75.Rs, 43.75.Yy, 43.75.Bc, 43.75Cd Influence of Room Acoustics on Choir Singing 3