Localization in real life and with individual, nonindividual, and artificial head binaural recordings
Henrik Møller · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1999
Human sound localization was studied in real life (1), and with binaural recordings made in the ears of the listener him/herself (2), in the ears of other humans (3), and with artificial heads (4). The localization with individual binaural recordings turned out to be identical to that of real life. An increased number of errors was seen for nonindividual binaural recordings, especially in terms of confusions between median plane sources. It proved possible to select human ‘‘recording heads’’ that offered recordings which gave more favorable results than others. The highest number of errors was seen with artificial head recordings. This is surprising, since the artificial heads aim at replicating the acoustics of the ‘‘average’’ human. Measurements of head-related transfer functions confirmed differences between data obtained with artificial heads and those obtained from humans. The paper gives an overview of experiments and measurements carried out at Aalborg University over a number of years.