Auditory Localization in Rooms: Acoustic Analysis and Behavior
Norbert Kopčo, Barbara G. Shinn‐Cunningham · 2002
In an ordinary room, reverberation and echoes in the signals reaching a listener’s ears influence auditory localization performance. The energy of the echoes and reverberation depends on the position of the listener in the room as well as on the position of the sound source relative to the listener. In this paper, the effects of echoes and reverberation are quantified through analysis of reverberant Head-Related Transfer Functions (HRTFs) measured in an ordinary classroom. HRTFs were measured for several human listeners and a KEMAR acoustic manikin at four different listener positions in the room and multiple source positions relative to the listener. Azimuthal localization performance was also measured for several listeners in the room as a function of listener position. Compared to the acoustic cues it was found to be less sensitive to a change in room location. The only similarity was found between the magnitude of frequency-to-frequency variations in basic localization cues and the variability in localization performance, demonstrating that localization accuracy decreases with increasing reverberant energy.