In recent years we have interviewed members of the audience after musical performances and asked them to evaluate the acoustics of the concert halls. A group of ‘music lovers’ (with a high level of musical training and experience) and ‘acousticians’ (with a wide knowledge of the physical characteristics of sound transmission) also attended each performance and answered the same questions as the general public. This group thereby served as a control group when evaluating surveys of the general public. In this paper, the results obtained when analyzing these control group surveys are presented. This analysis shows that a common vocabulary exists between music lovers and acousticians when rating a hall, although the grouping of the questions for each factor depends on the training of the respondents.

The acoustic evaluation of indoor environments is common in the application of virtual acoustics. In addition, in the study of cultural heritage buildings, it is a useful tool, but it is not so common when describing the acoustic environment in intangible cultural heritage events and even in outdoor environments. In this paper, the acoustic environment of the Water Tribunal of the Plain of Valencia (Spain) is studied. It is analyzed from a soundscape perspective, characterizing the sound source and evaluating it within relation to the environment and evaluating its subjective response. With the research carried out, it has been obtained, on the one hand, a complete study of the acoustics of the environment of the Water Tribunal and, on the other, an enhancement of the Valencian tangible and intangible heritage.

The present paper examines the historical evolution of the concert halls acoustic parameters, in the international field. From the beginnings of twentieth century, the acoustic parameters have had a continuous evolution, covering more and more aspects of the concert hall acoustics qualification. Since the bibliography about these is fragmented, we performed in this article, a global and updated presentation on the chronology and the evolution of the studied parameters. Considering the great variety of the same, we presents the appearance of each parameter, located in decades, who has proposed them and, where is possible, indicates articles or publications where they have been presented for the first time. Thus, the historical presentation of the majority of the acoustic parameters of concert halls, it optimizes and can be useful for future research as a central platform in a bibliographical study. The presentation of the same is also grouped according to quality criteria.

The acoustics of the ancient Greek and Roman theatres has always been rated as excellent by experts, without discussion. Beyond the purely architectural aspects, in this kind of outdoor theatres some mechanisms were used in order to improve the acoustics. In this paper we have studied the texts about "theatre's vases" of the famous book "On Architecture" by Vitruvius. Different interpretations and illustrations of these vases, that several translators carried out in the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, have been researched. From the wide bibliography consulted in this regard we have developed a plane with the disposition of the bronze vases in the theatres. In this plane we have specified the frequency of each one of them, and explained their disposition from the tetracordal musical system acquired from the Greek culture. Finally, an analysis of the disposition of the vases has been made. We have studied and looked for the musical intervals and harmonic relations among adjacent vases.

This paper describes the research job carried out at Polytechnic University of Valencia ‐Spain‐ about resonantcavities placed under the orchestra pits of Italian Opera Houses, and others acoustics mechanisms like this one. The Teatro Principal of Valencia was built following the project developed by the Italian architect Felipe Fontana in 1774 and it opened its doors in 1832. Fifteen years ago, in the last architectonic intervention in this theatre, almost a hundred of acoustic vases were found in one of those resonantcavities. What acoustics role they accomplish? How they "functioned"? This was the starting point to study this kind of artifices, throughout the eighteenth century European treatises about theatres and in our Teatro Principal.

The Ando-Beranek’s model, a linear version of Ando’s subjective preference theory, obtained by the authors in a recent work, was combined with Barron revised theory. An optimal volume region for each reverberation time was obtained for classical music in symphony orchestra concert halls. The obtained relation was tested with good agreement with the top rated halls reported by Beranek and other halls with reported anomalies.