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Study on the influence of acoustics on organ playing using room enhancement

Amengual Garí, Sebastià V.; Lachenmayr, Winfried and Kob, Malte 

A pilot study on the influence of different reverberation on the musical performance of organ players is presented. Using an organ with MIDI output three different organ players have been recorded performing the same pieces. Moreover, a room acoustics enhancement system is used to modify the acoustic conditions of the Detmold concert house in real time. Since the dynamics and tuning properties of the organ remain constant, the analysis focuses mainly on tempo features such as total duration, break duration and tempo variability, as extracted from the MIDI files. A set of binaural recordings has been obtained in order to relate the performance variations to the acoustic feedback received by the musicians. Finally, the participants are interviewed individually after the experiment to obtain their impressions of the influence of the acoustics. The results show that the reverberation has a direct influence on the musicians, leading to changes in tempo and duration of breaks between consecutive notes. However, this relation is conditioned by other factors such as the character of the piece, the level, the global tempo and the individual players.