AES Fall Online Convention

It is known that musicians tend to adjust their performance to the acoustical properties of the hall as they perceive. In a large reverberant hall, for example, they may play staccato notes even shorter than they would in a less reverberant hall to make the music more clearly understandable by the audience. In this study, four singers were invited to sing two (slow and fast) pieces of music in three venues, of which the reverberation times were 0.3, 1.8, and 3.4 seconds. Singers were surveyed with questions regarding the tempo, intonation, resonance and diction of their performance in each venue. Also, the singing voice was recorded by using a headset microphone and analyzed to relate the audio features to the characteristics of the venues. The results showed that the singers’ perception of the vocal resonance was significantly related to the venue (p=0.024), and so were the average sound level and the dynamic range of the sound level (p=0.040 for both dependent variables), which could partly be explained in relation to the reverberation time.