A Comparison between Impulse Responses of opera houses in Italy and Japan

Opera houses acoustics differ from concert halls, since Opera requires more clarity and intelligibility than music. Furthermore, usually opera houses were built in Italy, since opera has a strong tradition in towns such as Venice, Parma, Bologna. However, historical Opera houses were built also in other Countries, especially in Japan, even though Japanese traditional opera was completely different from Italian one. In this paper a comparison between an Italian Opera house (Teatro Alighieri in Ravenna) and a Japanese Noh theatre (in Kobe, Japan) are presented. Experimental measurements were conducted in both the theatres by means of the same instrumentation, i.e. dummy head (Neumann), a 3D microphone (Soundfield), and an omnidirectional loudspeaker. The calculation of mono-aural and binaural parameters showed a different behavior between the two theatres, which has been related to the different shape of the audience area.