Insights from three profiling studies of auralized concert hall acoustics: Support for a three dimensional perceptual space?

Since 2009, we have now completed three individual vocabulary profiling studies of auralized concert hall acoustics. In-line with the work of others, these studies have verified that the main perceptual aspects describing acoustic differences are, more or less, loudness, reverberance, width, envelopment, definition/clarity, brightness, bass, and proximity/intimacy. Our studies, however, do not indicate that these aspects would vary independently when moving from hall of to hall, but that the perceptual changes in many aspects generally co-occur. While independency can be understood in terms of attention, and the number of perceptual aspects by considering the different “tastes“ of listeners, it seems that the perceptual differences between halls are actually governed by three main factors. The interpretation of these factors depends on the viewpoint and here we discuss some possible interpretations based on these three profiling experiments and the literature as well as the implications concerning the objective parameters.