Acoustics of rooms for traditional Korean music

A large number of studies have investigated required criteria for the good acoustics of rooms for western music for a long time. However, little has been done for establishing criteria for the good acoustics of rooms for traditional Korean music. Due to the recent increasing interests in traditional Korean music in Korean local communities, the efforts to provide more dedicated spaces for playing and listening traditional Korean music have been made for the last couple of years. It seems urgent to establish proper criteria for the acoustic design of rooms for traditional Korean music. In this study, 10 halls built for traditional Korean music were visited and their acoustic conditions were measured and analyzed. Also, subjective experiments using the method of paired comparisons were carried out to obtain listeners' impression on the acoustics of each hall, using binaurally presented stimuli. In the subjective listening experiment, binaural impulse responses from dummy head recordings for each room were used to auralize an anechoic vocal and ensemble Korean music. Results suggest that treble ratio is an important factor for the good acoustics of rooms for traditional Korean music, while bass ratio plays a significant role in rooms for western music. Any significant difference between musicians' and non-musicians' preferences was not found. Also, the preferred acoustic conditions for vocal music were not significantly different from those for ensemble music.