Anechoic recordings of symphonic music

The instruments of a symphony orchestra were recorded one by one in an anechoic chamber. The musicians played their parts by watching a conductor in a monitor and by listening to a pianist playing the whole score. This way the musicians were able to adapt their playing style and tempo, and the synchronization between different players was possible. Since the size of a typical orchestra and the complexity of the music texture varies between periods, recordings of different music styles can provide more information about the acoustics in auralization. To have a more comprehensive selection of anechoic music excerpts, passages representing different styles were selected for the recordings: W. A. Mozart (1756-1791): An aria of Donna Elvira from the opera Don Giovanni. L. van Beethoven (1770-1827): Symphony no. 7, I movement, bars 1-53. A. Bruckner (1824-1896): Symphony no. 8, II movement, bars 1-61. G. Mahler's (1860-1911): Symphony no. 1, IV movement, bars 1-85.

Editing of recordings

Second editing stage was essential for correcting any timing inaccuracy between the instruments. First imported parts in each passage were edited by using the piano track as a timing reference. These parts included usually some string instrument parts and a wind instrument. Timing inaccuracies were corrected. After the first completed parts, the piano track was muted and the actual instrument recordings were used as timing reference from this point forward.

The goal in editing was not to create an unnaturally accurate synchronization. Therefore slight timing discrepancies were left unchanged. However, all the corrections were attempted to accomplish in a delicate manner so that the edits would not be easily perceived even by listening individual tracks.

Example auralizations

Auralization is a technique in which an anechoic stimulus is convolved with a modeled or measured impulse response of a space so that the listener can have a binaural listening experience [1]. In other words, with auralization the acoustics of a certain hall can be simulated and listened to. Here are example auralizations, computed with the recorded anechoic music as stimuli. The concert hall model is a model of Sigyn hall, located in Turku, Finland. The room acoustic modeling is performed with the image source method + late reverberation. For each omnidirectional source point upto 3rd order reflections are modeled and late reverberation (T60 = 1.8 sec) is rendered with an artificial reverberation algorithm. For more information about the implemented auralization, see [2,3].

Examples for headphone reproduction

Music	Anechoic recording	Conductor's position	Main floor	Back of the hall
Mozart 3 min 47 sec 41.8 MB
Beethoven 3 min 11 sec 35.0 MB
Bruckner 1 min 27 sec 16.3 MB
Mahler 2 min 12 sec 24.6 MB

References

Acknowledgements