Seeking differences between architects' and acousticians' concert hall assessments

By auditory and visual assessment, we investigate whether architects and acousticians describe their perception of concert hall acoustics in the same language. Four concert halls were represented in controlled in virtual reality environments. A total of 43 participants (23 acousticians, 20 architects-all with experience and interest in concert hall acoustics) participated in the experiment. During the experiment, all the participants were exposed to audio and video excerpts in two different positions across the four concert halls. An individual vocabulary profiling method (IVP) was used to collect the participants' attributes and textual ratings of the virtual spaces. The data were further analyzed via hierarchical multiple factorial analysis. The results reveal significant distinctions in the perceptual vocabulary and evaluation strategies employed by the two groups of professions, quantifying the perceptual dimensions without consensus vocabulary. They reveal a quasi-bidimensional perception space on architects using visual attributes and on acousticians using auditory attributes, but a higher perception space for the inverse modalities. Finally, the correlation between subjective and objective acoustical parameters reveals discrepancies between both expert groups on which objective parameter correlates with subjective balance and timbre, while it shows agreement for other subjective parameters.