Influence of virtual room acoustics on choir singing

Abstract

Multitrack recordings of a mixed adult choir with 23 singers were collected in order to investigate the influence of varied virtual room acoustical conditions on a choir’s performance with regard to intonation, tempo, and timing precision. Headset microphones were used to record each chorister separately while the collected sound of all singers was presented via headphones exerting acoustic simulations of rooms with different acoustical parameters, for example, different reverberation times of 1.87 and 5.91 s as well as a dry condition (without reverberation added) according to 3 singing conditions. The choir was asked to sing “Locus Iste” by Anton Bruckner (1824–1896). Objective measures were obtained from single audio track analyses using the monophonic pitch tracker pYIN plugin for Sonic Visualiser. These revealed that intonation was barely affected by simulated room acoustics, whereas tempo was notably slower and timing precision declined in the condition where participants sang in a comparatively reverberant virtual room. Subjective judgments gathered by a questionnaire inquiring on the singers’ experiences showed a clear preference for singing in a virtual room with a reverberation time of 1.87 s, while the dry acoustical condition was felt to be the best to sing in time. The significance of these results and their relationships to other musical and acoustical parameters are discussed.