Non-verbal Perception of Room Acoustics using Multi Dimensional Scaling Metho

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel method using Multi Dimensional Scaling to identify five perceptual dimensions of room acoustics based on binaural measurements and psychoacoustic features.

Contribution

It presents an alternative approach to subjective room acoustics characterization by combining binaural measurements with MDS to reveal perceptual dimensions.

Findings

Perception of room acoustics has 5 key dimensions.

These dimensions correlate with specific psychoacoustic measures.

The approach offers a new way to analyze subjective acoustic impressions.

Abstract

Subjective room acoustics impressions play an important role for the performance and reception of music in concert venues and auralizations. Therefore, room acoustics since the 20th century dealt with the relationship between objective, acoustic parameters and subjective impressions of room acoustics. One common approach is to correlate acoustic measures with experts' subjective ratings of rooms as recalled from their long-term memory, and explain them using acoustical measures. Another approach is to let listeners rate auralized room acoustics on bipolar scales and find objective correlates. In this study, we present an alternative approach to characterizing the subjective impressions of room acoustics. We concolve music with binaural room impulse response measurements and utilize Multi Dimensional Scaling (MDS) to identify the perceptual dimensions of room acoustics. Results show that the perception of room acoustics has $5$ dimensions that can be explained by the (psycho-)acoustical measures echo density, fractal correlation dimension, roughness, loudness, and early decay time.