Preface

Since 1985, when the first volume of this series, Concert Hall Acoustics, was published, remarkable progress has been made in temporaland spatial-primary percepts of sound. The subjective preference theory, well based on neural evidence of the sound field, has been developed. Thus, a model of the auditory pathway with brain activities has been reconfirmed (Ando 1985, 1998, 2009). The specialization of the left and right human cerebral hemispheres that support the model of the auditory-brain system has been well described. Neural activities related to subjective preference of the sound field and the visual field have been discovered. Subjective preference is made up of the most primitive responses of subjective attributes, because preferences are an evaluative judgment, and judgment is performed in the direction of maintaining life and is deeply related to aesthetic issues. Overall, subjective responses including the annoyance of environmental noise, speech recognition (Ando 2015), and reverberance as well as subjective preference of the sound field may be well described by both temporal and spatial factors. Such significant temporal and spatial factors are extracted from the running autocorrelation function and the interaural cross-correlation function, respectively. A new possible type of opera house can be designed by the maximization of the scale value of subjective preference of the sound field applying the genetic algorithm (GA). Also, a wide range of applications of this model is available including those for quality of the sound field in an opera house with the stage for vocal sources and the pit for musical instruments, and the visual field on the stage can be well designed. This volume focuses on Opera House Acoustics Based on Subjective Preference Theory. The author aims to present information to researchers and students in acoustics and vision who are interested in physics, psychology, brain physiology, and understanding of any subjective attributes in relation to objective parameters. The well-known Helmholtz theory, which was based on a peripheral model of auditory system, unfortunately has failed to describe pitch, timbre, and duration as