Acoustic quality of auditoria: Relationship between acoustical energy parameters and subjective perception

The acoustic design auditoria is founded on objective acoustic parameters determined on the basis of the computed or measured impulse response. Such objective parameters are related on the average response of the human ear to transient sounds, without considering the subjective perception of the individual, which, in turn, is related also to social and education aspects. The aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between individual sound perceptions and energy parameters. In detail, a questionnaire has been submitted to a sample of people listening to tracks of different musical genres. The questionnaire has been conceived to come up with a classification model for the audience allowing to express the listener's experience according to different indicators, such as overall acoustic quality and overall acoustic experience. Results of this experiment are analyzed by means of Random Forest non-parametric model belonging to the data mining algorithms. The final purpose of the study is to define which physical and acoustical characteristics are the most suitable to represent the subjective perceptions of the listeners.