In 1962, Beranek published his pioneering study, Music, Acoustics & Architecture, which sought to understand what constitutes good acoustic qualities for music. Having worked as an acoustician for decades prior, one of Beranek’s main critiques of technical literature during the 20th century, was that discussion of acoustic quality was limited to the author’s observations or a collection of disorganised opinions with varying degrees of agreeance. Additionally, because acoustics are listened to and not just measured, a degree of subjectivity and preference naturally plays into qualitative evaluation. Therefore, the study aimed at establishing a set of qualitative acoustic parameters which reflected quantitative acoustic measures and use them to develop a common set of guidelines for architectural acoustic design parameters. The initial study involved surveying expert listeners (musicians and music critics) on the acoustic quality fifty-four concert halls and opera houses. The study was later revised to include a total of one hundred halls in his 2004 book Concert Halls and Opera Houses. Music, Acoustics, and Architecture. The selection of studied halls was restricted to those where the architectural drawings and acoustic measurements were largely available to provide an overview of proportions, materials, capacities, and performance types. As expected, the Vienna Großer Musikvereinssaal came out on top, and London’s Royal Albert Hall, firmly at the bottom.

This was the first and remains the largest survey of performance venue acoustics ever performed. Beranek originally defined 18 different qualitative acoustic criteria which formed the basis of subjective studies into acoustics, however, the methodology for rating these was quickly met with criticism. In 1970, the work of Hawkes and Douglas first identified the issues with the ratings assigned to these criteria, and this was refined later in 1988 by Mike Barron. The outcome was a survey comprising of five independent bipolar scales: clarity for musical detail, reverberance which provides support and contributes to the envelopment of the sound, intimacy for the sense of proximate relationship, and finally that the perceived loudness is adequate. Three additional questions for the balance of treble, bass, and soloist, background noise, and overall impression of the acoustic quality are also included. The beauty of this survey is that all the terms are easily understood by both expert, and non-expert listeners alike, and can therefore be applied to survey the average concertgoer. Barron’s work, amongst many others, went on to contribute to the inclusion of qualitative measures in the international standards of acoustic measurement, ISO3382.