Developments in measuring the acoustic characteristics of concert halls and opera houses are leading to standardized methods of impulse response capture for a wide variety of auralization applications. The work presented here are some of the results from a recent UK survey of non-traditional performance venues focused in the field of acoustic archaeology. Sites have been selected and analyzed based on some feature of interest in terms of their acoustic properties. As well as providing some insight as to the characteristics and construction of these spaces, the resulting database of measurements has a primary use in convolution based reverberation and auralization. The initial survey work has been funded by the Arts Council England and the AHRC as part of their ACE/AHRC Arts/Science Research Fellowships. Damian Murphy was appointed as one of these fellows and is the lead researcher in this work that now falls partly under the remit of SpACE-Net. Later work was sponsored by the York Renaissance Project in conjunction with artist and archaeologist John Oxley and artist Mark Hildred. More details relating to this work, including details relaing to the measurement techniques used can be found in the following publications:

• D. T. Murphy, "Multi-channel Impulse Response Measurement, Analysis and Rendering in Archaeological Acoustics", 119th AES Convention, Paper No. 6532, New York, USA, Oct 7-10, 2005. Available Here.
• D. T Murphy, "Spatial Audio Measurement, Modeling and Composition," Leonardo, Vol. 39, No.5 (2006) - Forthcoming.
• D.T Murphy, "Archaeological Acoustic Space measurement for convolution reverberation and auralization applications", Proc. of the 9th Int. Conference on Digital Audio Effects (DAFX’06), Montreal, Canada, September 18-20, 2006. Available online Here.

In addition, the following links have been invaluable in providing direction for this work:

• Angelo Farina's Home Page
• Preserving Acoustics for Posterity - www.acoustics.net - associated with Waves.

The Files

All impulse responses are in 24 bit 48kHz wav format, pointing directly at the source at angle 0 deg. according to the method presented in the above publications. 96kHz versions are available at 5deg intervals for the complete measurement circle through negotiation with the authors. There are three IR files presented here for each site. The first corresponds to a near-coincident stereo pair in ORTF format. The second pair of responses are given in 4-channel Ambisonic B-format as two stereo files corresponding to channels WX and YZ.

• Maes Howe Passage Tomb
• Hamilton Mausoleum
• St. Andrew's Church, Lyddington
• York Minster

If you have any questions, comments or suggestions then please contact me.