A Comparative Study on Indoor Sound Quality of the Practice Rooms upon Classical Singing Trainees’ Preference
Regular paper
Bilkent University
Tuesday 2 june, 2015, 09:40 - 10:00
0.9 Athens (118)
Abstract:
In music schools, indoor sound quality is a crucial necessity since students
and
trainees are learning and improving their skills by listening to their own
instruments or voices. Currently, the majority of music schools have sound
absorbent panels on wall surfaces to adjust reverberation time (RT) in the
practice rooms. However, misuse of sound absorbent panels may lead classical
singing trainees to utilize improper technique since they adjust their
voices to
suit the acoustics of these rooms. This study investigates the optimum
reverberation time (RT) for a room by varying the distribution and the
number of
sound absorbent panels to determine the classical singing trainees’ sound
preferences along with their subjective assessment towards indoor sound
quality.
Three different room settings were determined according to the amount of
reverberation time, consecutively (dead to live). The
trainees sang vowels as high and as low as they could in each setting.
Reference
tones were presented by a piano shortly before producing each vocal sound.
Data
was taken from 30 classical singing trainees with an age range of 15 to 30
through
questionnaires at Bilkent University, Faculty of Music and Performing Arts.
Results have shown that the majority of trainees choose the dead room
setting as the most preferable, which has a slightly dead reverberation time
around 0.6 seconds.