DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.15013522
title: O'er all the Hilltops is Loud Now - Spatial Room Impulse Response Dataset of Goethehäuschen in Ilmenau

description: The Goethehäuschen on the Kickelhahn  mountain is an importaint cultural site for the town of Ilmenau, Germany (coordinates: N50.66655704262203◦, E10.879361291445◦). Here the poet J. W. Goethe scribbled his famous poem "Wanderers Nachtlied" (Wanderer's Nightsong) on the walls. The Goethehäuschen is a small wooden cabin, built in 1780. It burned down in 1870 and was rebuild 4 years later. Since then, the building has undergone multiple restorations to preserve its original structure and protect it from environmental damage.

For more details on the measurment setup, see  O'er all the hilltops Is loud now - Spatial acoustic measurement and dataset creation of the Goethehäuschen in Ilmenau (S. Schwarze et al., Proceedings of DAS|DAGA 2025 March 17-20, 2025, Copenhagen, pp. 1510-1512).

This dataset contains Room Impulse Responses recorded with a open 7-piece microphone array at 57 positions within the cabin. 30 positions in the ground floor (downstairs.zip)  and 21 positions in the upper floor (upstairs.zip) were measured using a mobile robotic platform. In the staircase, 5 additional measurments where carried out by hand (stairway.zip) , as well as one single measurment outside of the cabin in front of the entrance (outside.zip). All measurments were repeated once in case of errors or noises occuring.

8 loudspeakers were  deployed at fixed positions in and around the cabin for all of the microphone positions. See measurment arrangement.jpg for arrangement of source and receiver positions.

pictures.zip contains some additional pictures from the measurement setup in and around the Goetehäuschen.

Acknowledgment

The presented work is funded within the project Multiparties in the framework KMU-innovativ: Interactive Technologies for Health and Quality of Life of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, Germany.

We would like to thank the Goethegesellschaft Ilmenau-Stützerbach e.V. in cooperation with Prof. Dr.-Ing. Hans-Peter Schade, who made this project and the resulting dataset possible. 

We would also like to thank hsf Studentenradio e.V. and Forschungsgemeinschaft elektronische Medien e.V. for providing additional equipment to make the measurements possible.

Finally, we would like to thank the Berggastsätte Kickelhahn for providing the electricity to carry out the measurements.
description: During the measurements on the upper floor, there was a draught through the open windows, which caused significant noise during many of the recordings.

To identify the faulty measurements, the energy decay curves were compared and evaluated manually. The results of this evaluation are available in upstairs manual rating.csv. A rating of 0 means severe disturbances, 1 medium and 2 no recognizable disturbance (with this method).

The procedure was also carried out for the other measurements, but showed no anomalies there
description: The MetraLabs TORY robotic platform has a two-wheel drive and can therefore turn on the spot in addition to translation on the plane




In previous studies, the positioning accuracy of the robotic platform in translation was determined to be 3.0 cm on average, with an average measurement accuracy of 2.2 cm. For the rotation, the positioning accuracy was determined to be 0.6° on average and the average measuring accuracy to be 0.7°.




The recordings were made with a 7-piece microphone array. It consists of 6 electret microphones (called satelites) that are spherically distributed with a diameter of 100 mm around an Earthworks M30 measurement microphone.




In relation to the measurment microphone the positions of the satellite microphones are as follows:




Microphone
Audio Channel
x [mm]
y [mm]
z [mm]




Satellite 1
1
50
0
0


Satellite 2
2
0
-35
-35


Satellite 3
3
0
-35
35


Satellite 4
4
-50
0
0


Satellite 5
5
0
35
35


Satellite 6
6
0
35
-35


Measurement Microphone
7
0
0
0







The impulse responses where computed from exponential sine sweep recordings. The sine sweeps went from 40Hz to 22kHz in 6 seconds with additional 2 seconds of decay time afterwards.




The speakers used for excitation were Geithain RL900A.




The SRIRs were computed from the sine sweep recordings using the Spatial Decomposition Method (SDM).




This dataset is in SOFA 2.1 file format as described in AES69-2022. The files follow the convention SingleRoomSRIR Version 1.0.