Room Acoustical Parameters as Predictors of Room Acoustical Impression: What Do We Know and What Would We Like to Know?

Room acoustical parameters are audio features, usually extracted from monaural or binaural measurements of room acoustical environments, and used to predict different aspects of the ‘room acoustical impression’. The paper takes a closer look at the nature of this perceptional construct and at different approaches to develop a psychological measuring instrument for the multidimensional perceptional profile of room acoustical environments. Even after several decades of research, there is no satisfactory solution available for this purpose. The reasons for this lie in methodological deficits with respect to test development and item analysis as well as in a much too small sample of stimuli used in previous studies. Prospects for progress are opened up by state-of-the-art technologies for room acoustical simulation and auralization, which may be used to provide a large and representative sample of room acoustical environments as well as an authentic presentation in experimental studies. The fundamental perceptional components delivered by this approach will, most likely, not be predictable by traditional room acoustical parameters, but require advanced measurement techniques based on spherical arrays of transducers for both source and receiver characteristics, as well as new auditory models for feature extraction. The physical and psychological aspects of the problem are, in any case, inextricably linked with each other.