Tapio Lokki (Aalto University School of Electrical Engineering) – Sensory evaluation of concert hall acoustics: How a hall could act as a compressor or an expander?

In this talk I'll first present the facilities and activities of the Aalto Acoustics Lab (https://www.aalto.fi/en/aalto-acoustics-lab). Then, I tell the main results of my decade long research on the sensory evaluation of concert hall acoustics. One novelty that we found is the effect of concert halls to change the music we perceived in a non-linear manner. In other words, in some halls the dynamics in music is compressed and in some other halls the difference in orchestra music in pianissimo and in fortissimo is much larger. This phenomenon can be explained by combining the varying spectrum of the orchestra and non-linear aspects of human hearing.