Caracterization of the acoustic quality of classrooms for musical practice and teaching

Abstract Musicians need to properly perceive sound in the rooms destined to music study and practice. That is possible when those rooms are acoustically prepared and thus enable the development and improvement of musical sound perception. In this study, three study rooms and three collective music classrooms at a university were characterised acoustically through the opinions of their musician-users and measurements of their impulsive responses, as well as by the subsequent calculation of the rooms' acoustic parameters. Rooms described by musicians as dry presented average reverberation times of 0.3 seconds in the 500-1000 Hz octave bands, clarity between 14 and 22 dB and definition between 88% and 96 %. The rooms described as reverberant ones are characterised by reverberation times around 1.5 seconds, clarity of 1 dB and definition of 40%. The musicians' opinions allowed us to understand their preferences for the acoustic quality of the rooms, and to conclude that the information provided by them was quite consistent with the data measurements.