The acoustical conditions preferred for ensemble
Adele H. Marshall, D. Gottlob, H. Alrutz · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1978
Observations on the acoustical conditions preferred by musicians when performing lead to the following hypotheses: (a) Ease of ensemble depends upon the audibility of musical transients in the early reflection sequence. (b) Reverberation plays only a minor part in ensemble, though it is the most preferred acoustical condition for soloists. These proposals were tested experimentally. Reflection-free recordings of the individual instruments in a string trio were made simultaneous. Each musician then played his/her part again in ensemble with recordings of the other two instruments, while sound fields were synthesized from the recordings to simulate stage conditions. High- and low-pass filtering of the reflections with cutoff frequencies between 250 and 2000 Hz were used in successive trials. The musicians were asked to judge the ease of ensemble relative to the preceding trial. In some cases the musicians volunteered comparisons with earlier trials as well and seemed to find no difficulty in deciding. High-pass reflections were generally preferred to low-pass or even to unfiltered reflections. In subsequent trials the effect of increasing the simulated stage size and of imbalance between reflections of different instruments were included.Some design guides for stages for orchestral music are proposed.