Ricerc@Sapienza

The acoustic quality in auditorium and concert halls is normally evaluated by the measurements of Impulse responses (monaural, binaural or even MIMO). The subjective evaluation is often obtained by convolving anechoic music with the measured IRs. The psycho-acoustical experiment is achieved using a virtual sound field representation. At the University of Bologna, the listening room Arlecchino includes Ambisonics and stereo dipole techniques for playback. In this paper, two different Italian opera houses and two Japanese concert halls were analysed.

The design of auditoria and opera houses requires particular care for the stage area, where several different requirements should be achieved for the performers. Among these, the acoustic quality represents a fundamental aspect, and it differs from the listeners' perspective. Moreover, the performing area in concert halls is often an important area for non-acoustic reasons, since lighting, thermal plants, etc. are often placed in this special zone, and should be properly designed in order to guarantee a high level of global comfort.

In music education, teachers and students often complain about acoustical discomfort. The facilities dedicated to study and musical training play an important role in risk assessment and have to respect standards on architectural acoustics.

In underwater acoustic networks (UWANs) with bidirectional communication links, channel state information (CSI) plays an important role since having a good channel knowledge allows system performance enhancements. Two communicating nodes can use the information obtained by their respective channel estimation in order to adjust the transmission parameters to the channel characteristics. However forward channel estimation is generally different from the backward one. In this paper we investigate the acoustic channel reciprocity in a shallow water communication.