Temporal Continuous Sound Stimuli; Experience in Measurements and Subjective Evaluation of Stimuli in a Musical Context

1.1. Evaluation of music dynamics The background for this paper is previous performed experiments on subjective evaluation of listening responses to live music with special focus on loudness (”musical strength”) and music dynamics. The question is weather or not it is possible to subjectively ”integrate” and pronounce some reliable and meaningful quantitative measure of loudness after having listened to music for a long period of time, i.e. up to several minutes. The collections of data presented here include subjective level judgments from both laboratory studies and concert listening in the Frimurerlogen Concert Hall (the “Scheherezade” experiment) and the Church of Sakshaug (the “Towards Light and Joy” experiment). 2. Long-time level evaluations Subjective evaluations of musical sound level and dynamics of the Rimsky-Korsakov Scheherezade were performed at the Frimurerlogen Concert Hall, Trondheim. 20 listeners (music students) were divided in two groups (5 male, 5 female in each group), one group just in front of the podium, the other further away. For documentation and control reasons we made dummy head recordings from the center of each group. Data acquisition systems and procedures for similar tasks concerning noise monitoring and subjective response evaluation have been in use for years. Even if there are similarities in human noise exposure and music exposure, music listening research seems to have concentrated on more specific subtopics like intention and emotion transfer, instrument and sound source control and visualization of musical sounds rather than evaluating music as a one dimensional temporal continuous sound stimulus. This paper discusses some basic considerations of measurements and subjective evaluation of musical stimuli, and refers to some examples of performology measurements and subjective music listening tests emphasizing music dynamics.