Comparison of the auditory and auditory-visual perception in four concert halls

An interesting research question is still to what extent the visual impression of a room influences the auditory perception. Subjective evaluations have been collected for four concert halls based on Individual Vocabulary Profiling (IVP) and MUSHRA-like ratings. The experiment was conducted with two groups, each comprising 20 participants. One group performed the auditory-visual experiment (AV) with 360-degree photographs of the halls being presented in a head-mounted display. The other group performed a blind test (B) evaluating the stimuli purely auditorily without seeing the hall. The acoustic stimuli were identical and reproduced over head-tracked headphones for both groups. The stimuli consisted of anechoic orchestra recordings that have been convolved with measured spatial impulse responses from the concert halls under study. The aggregated comparative ratings allow to study the differences induced by the type of presentation, i.e. auditory versus auditory-visual. For this purpose, a multiple factor analysis has been performed that highlights the dominant perceptual dimensions. The results show that differences between the two presentation types can be mainly seen in the timbre, intimacy, reverberation and spatial perception.