Discrimination thresholds of the reverberation in large volumes by naïve listeners

Alexis Billon (1) , Jean-Jacques Embrechts (1)

1 Université de Liège

Reverberation is one of the main perceptual dimensions allowing to rate and to discriminate the acoustics of rooms. Several studies concerning its perceptive threshold have been carried out previously. The resulting threshold values are somewhat scattered, varying between 4% and more than 20%. These studies differ in terms of sound stimuli, length of the reverberation, experiment design and experience of the subjects. In this study, a comparison and an adjustment experiments were carried out using three sound stimuli: white noise, male spoken words and an orchestral extract. The room impulse responses used in these comparisons are characterized by frequency-dependent decays. The reverberation time at 1000Hz of the mean impulse response was 1,89s which is representative of a medium size concert hall. The subjects were students with half of them playing a musical instrument regularly. They had no prior experience in terms of perceptual audio testing. A differentiation threshold around 10% is obtained, varying slightly with the experimental conditions and the sound stimuli. The thresholds obtained for speech signals were lower of about 2% than those obtained for white noise and the orchestral piece of music.

Mots clés: Reverberation; Room acoustics; Perceptive testing

Domaines: Acoustique [physics.class-ph]

Alexis Billon, Jean-Jacques Embrechts. Discrimination thresholds of the reverberation in large volumes by naïve listeners. Acoustics 2012, Apr 2012, Nantes, France. ⟨hal-00811156⟩