Noise generated by the audience during musical performances is audible and sometimes disturbing. In this study, an attempt to estimate such audience noise was carried out. From the recordings of performances in five performance spaces (four concert halls and one opera house), probability density functions of the sound pressure levels were obtained in octave bands, which were fitted with three G...

Historically, two equations have been used for predicting reverberation times, Sabine and Eyring. A precise means is presented for determining Eyring absorption coefficients alpha(eyring) when the Sabine coefficients alpha(sabine) are known, and vice versa. Thus, either formula can be used provided the absorption coefficients for the Sabine formula are allowed to exceed 1.0. The Sabine formula ...

Lecture halls are often the main places for discussion between educators and students. They are therefore ideal starting points for incorporating technology into teaching. To be widely accepted, the technology must be useful without distracting lecturer or audience. We present a lecture hall infrastructure and a headset that provide attractive but unobtrusive support for both educators and stud...

The study of hall acoustics continues to suffer from the difficulties of obtaining accurate measurements of halls in the presence of audience and musicians. An effective measurement technique must be fast, accurate, pleasant, and entertaining. It has become routine to measure unoccupied halls using a Maximum Length Sequence (MLS) as a stimulus. Originally chosen because MLS stimuli can be decon...

The existing body of literature regarding the acoustic design of concert halls has focused almost exclusively on classical music, although there are many more performances of popular music, including rock and pop. Objective measurements were made of the acoustics of 20 rock music venues in Denmark and a questionnaire was used in a subjective assessment of those venues with professional rock mus...

In recent years several classic halls for chamber music were renovated and a few halls of similar capacity were built in Russia. We have selected the most interesting ones and measured their acoustical parameters. Here we are presenting detailed descriptions of five halls in Moscow, Tula, Ufa and Penza in combination with the measurement data. Some of them have long reverberation time and their...

Surveys among professional musicians and sound engineers reveal that a long reverberation time at low frequencies in halls during concerts of reinforced music is a common cause for an unacceptable sounding event. Midand high-frequency sound is seldom a reason for lack of clarity and definition due to a up to 6 times higher absorption by audience compared to low frequencies, and a higher directi...