Chen and Cabrera set out to better understand how color influences experiences in concert halls using virtual reality depictions of concert halls; select surfaces were one color or another, depending on the test condition. They report that study participants rated “loudness, reverberance, and their visual and auditory preference for multiple virtual reality scenes of a concert hall with various colors and with a music excerpt of various levels of gain and reverberation time. Results show that color has little or no effect on loudness and reverberance compared to changing gain or reverberation time. However, color does affect visual and auditory preference. . . . Of the five colors tested, red is the most-liked color for the selected concert hall, followed by neutral [white], blue, and yellow, while green is the least liked color. The color preference is related to the commonly used color styles of existing halls. . . . For each [colored] element, the saturation and brightness values of the colors and the texture of the materials were constant between scenes, while only hue was changed (apart from the neutral scene, for which saturation was set to 0%).”
Yuxiao Chen and Densil Cabrera. 2021. “The Effect of Concert Hall Color on Preference and Auditory Perception.” Applied Acoustics, vol. 171, 107544, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apacoust.2020.107544