Investigation of improved metrics for the characterization of musicians' room acoustical conditions in concert halls

Magazine article, 2012

A number of metrics for assessing the acoustical conditions for performers on concert hall stages have been proposed, notably by Anders Gade but also others. However, the subjective relevance of existing stage acoustic metrics for musicians, appears mainly to be associated with the communication with the audience rather than with the communication between musicians. No acoustic metrics have been identified to assess the balance between the hearing of others vs. the hearing of one’s own instrument, which appears paramount to orchestral musicians. Problems regarding presence of orchestra, directional characteristics of instruments, distances from instruments to ears of musicians, etc., also have been an issue for researchers, making the work difficult, expensive and imprecise. However, in this paper, due to the comparative approach used, some of these problems were removed, since they are basically the result of properties of orchestral arrangement rather than stage conditions and can be assumed similar from one stage to another. In this paper, a number of laboratory experiments as well as measurements on real stages have been studied and a pair of metrics, namely G[self] and G[others] are suggested to assess the balance between the hearing of self and that of hearing others.