Akustisk komfort i musikövningsrum

Preferred acoustic characteristics in a room can vary depending on the purpose of the room. A room adjusted to e.g. teaching may not be suitable for music practice and a room suitable for one type of instrument may not fit another. The judgement of what defines good and bad acoustics is subjective and differs among individuals. Practice rooms at music schools are good examples of rooms were the acoustic characteristics are very important. Opinions among the musicians concerning the acoustic properties in such rooms vary depending on music instrument types. Different musicians playing the same instrument do also have different opinions. Many musicians suffer from ear damages of different kinds and this is a serious problem. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate how the acoustics in different practice rooms can be adapted to different types of instruments and what can be done to prevent ear damages. This is done by comparing subjective judgements of the acoustics whith objective measurements. Questionnaires are handed out to musicians at Malmö Academy of Music (Musikhögskolan i Malmö) who have spanish guitar, a brass instrument or a bowed string instrument as their main instrument. Two types of questionnaires are handed out. The first is a qualitative one. The musicians are asked which practice rooms at the school they think are most suitable and least suitable for practicing their instrument and which acoustic characteristics these judgements depend upon. According to the answers from these questionnaires three rooms are chosen for further investigations. The second questionnaire is a adjective test, which is quantitative one, and concernes the chosen rooms. The questionnaire consists of a number of adjectives that describes the sound in a room and two questions concerning the general impression of the room and experienced ear problems. Each adjective and question has a seven grade scale and the musicians are asked to fill in how well they think each word and question describes the sound in the room. Sound measurements are made in the chosen rooms to obtain objective measures. Measurements of the sound insulation and impulse response are made. From the impulse response a number of objective measures can be derived. The subjective measures from the second questionnaire are compared with the objective measures to see if there are any connections. The main purpose is to investigate which subjective and objective measures affects the general impression of the room and experienced ear problems. Sertian values of the objective measures that corresponds to a good general impression of a room or few experienced ear problems can then be derived by using regression lines. According to these values, recommendations, objective measures and the answers from the questionnaires suggestions are given on how practice rooms can be adapted to fit the chosen instrument groups. There are not enough answers from the second questionnaire to make a proper statistic comparison. The results are therefor insecure