Online Guide to Room Acoustics for Musicians
Online Guide to Room Acoustics for Musicians
Interactive Project Report
Published: December 18, 2023 | How to cite
Authors
Malte Kob (Hochschule für Musik Detmold) [PI], Martha de Francisco (McGill University), Fabien Lévy (Hochschule für Musik und Theater Leipzig), Kit Soden (Université de Montréal), and Caroline Traube (Université de Montréal)
This project spurred the development of an internet-based guide for musicians that describes, in layperson terms, the fundamentals of acoustic features of musical instruments, stages, and performance/rehearsal rooms using visual and auditory examples. The guide also aims to explain what and how parameters can be assessed along with the audio recordings to document a musical performance.
In honour of the 200th anniversary of Hermann von Helmholtz, the famous Helmholtz resonator effect was taken as an exemplary entry for the online guide and processed from a series of videos to the underlying physical principle. Since the Helmholtz effect is present in diverse sound sources such as the double bass, a blown bottle, and the deep booming inside a car with an open window, a common approach was followed to derive a uniform physical interpretation based upon these different occurrences in daily life. For each of these examples a short video was created.
This project’s output has been integrated into the online framework wiki.audio, which boosts its visibility to users beyond ACTOR . The wiki.audio community comprises teachers, students, and members of non-profit organizations including German Acoustical Society (DEGA), Verband Deutscher Tonmeister (VDT), Audio Engineering Society Germany (AES Germany). The full entry for Helmholtz resonators is available here: https://wiki.audio/En/0051