Perception of loudness and envelopment for different orchestral dynamics

One of the main factors that makes listening to live concerts emotionally engaging is the dynamic changes in the music. Recent research has shown that concert hall acoustics can affect the perception of orchestral dynamics, but hardly any listening tests have focused on this interplay between the dynamics in music and hall acoustics. In this study, the influence of the orchestral dynamics is assessed with auralizations of musical excerpts of different dynamics (from pianissimo to fortissimo) in two listening positions within four different concert halls. Pairwise comparisons were made in terms of loudness and envelopment which are among the main perceptual factors of concert hall acoustics. The subjective results show that the loudness and envelopment can depend on the musical dynamics. Therefore, in future research on concert hall acoustics, much more attention should be paid to the dynamically varying spectrum of the stimulus signal and the listening level, not only to linear impulse responses used for computing objective parameters.