Does the color of a concert venue change how we hear music? German researchers have an answer.
SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Picture this – you’re finding your seat at a concert, like this one at the Berkeley Community Orchestra.
(APPLAUSE)
DETROW: The auditorium is packed. There are dozens of musicians on stage. They all begin to tune their instruments – cellos, violins, flutes. And in your mind’s eye, do you stop to look at the color of the concert hall?
(SOUNDBITE OF INSTRUMENTS BEING TUNED)
STEFAN WEINZIERL: We try to find out whether, also, the visual design of a concert hall influences how we like the sound, how we perceive the sound.
JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
That’s Stefan Weinzierl.
WEINZIERL: I’m head of the audio communication group at TU Berlin in Germany.
SUMMERS: His team at Technical University Berlin wanted to find out if the color of a space changes the way we hear music. Here’s how they did it.
DETROW: First, they designed a virtual reality auditorium with headsets and headphones.
WEINZIERL: We created a replica of a Berlin concert hall in this visual environment.
SUMMERS: Second, they modified how the venue would look to different participants.
WEINZIERL: We were able to change the colors of the seats, of the stage, of the walls in the hall…
SUMMERS: The color, the intensity of the color and how dark the room appeared.
WEINZIERL: …Green, blue, red.
DETROW: Then they asked dozens of people to watch a concert in that virtual reality setting.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
WEINZIERL: They heard and saw a musician playing on the stage in different colors and were asked how loud they thought it is, how reverberant they find the hall, but also what the timbre of the hall is.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SUMMERS: For almost all their responses, the color of the hall didn’t change anything except for one.
WEINZIERL: We found an influence on the perceived timbre.
DETROW: Timbre, or sound color.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
WEINZIERL: So what you describe with attributes like, it sounds brilliant. It sounds clear. It sounds warm.
DETROW: People who watched a performance in a bright green or blue room thought the music sounded cooler or rougher. People who saw a dark red room described the same music as warm.
SUMMERS: But why did the hall have this effect? The team had two theories.
WEINZIERL: One is a semantic one.
SUMMERS: Weinzierl said if people are trying to talk about the way something sounds with visual descriptors, it makes sense that what they saw as they listened would affect how they interpreted those sounds.
DETROW: The other reason is that we associate specific building materials with specific colors.
WEINZIERL: When you see a dark red surface, you would assume that this is not wood and probably also not metal, but something that has cloth or a curtain.
DETROW: That might make you think the music in the hall sounds a little warmer, less metallic.
SUMMERS: And Weinzierl says that little difference might matter a lot the next time you sit down to listen.
(SOUNDBITE OF BOCCHERINI STRING QUINTET’S “LA MUSICA NOTTURNA DELLE STRADE DI MADRID”)
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