A Preliminary Investigation of the Perceived Smallest Sound Duration Change in a Room

The present work aims at producing a test, similar to a speech intelligibility test, which can be used to rate the acoustic quality of rooms for music. Listeners' perceptions of the duration of sounds were investigated in an attempt to find a useful indicator of the acoustics of a room for music and speech. The research design was based on a discrimination task and a 2AFC experimental procedure. Two experiments were carried out in which two acoustic variables, reverberation time and background noise level, were varied and listeners' smallest perceivable sound duration changes were measured. It was found that the listeners' duration perceptions were significantly influenced by the reverberation time and background noise level of the listening environment, and that these discrimination procedures may form the basis for room acoustics assessments.