The acoustical design of concert halls

This paper presents a short introduction into the developed history of the design of concert halls and the success of four recently designed halls.A brief account is given of the objective parameters that can now be measured in halls and ralate to subjective response.These parameters are reverberation time,initial time delay gap,loudness,diffusion,lateral reflection and early to late energy ratio.Finally,recently developed methods of sound field simulation are briefly introduced by which some acoustical properties can be predicted.