An Investigation of Width and Depth Perception toward a Sound Image Constructed of Multiple Variant Sound Waves Emitted from a Loudspeaker Array

Abstract

Many musical instruments, including violins and guitars, vibrate their resonant bodies differently over their surface when they make a sound. This paper aims to reveal the influences of such vibration variation of a soundboard surface on the width and depth perception of the sound image when listeners were in a near‐field 50 cm or 1 m away from the soundboard. In this paper, a loudspeaker array mimicked the surface vibration as each loudspeaker makes a corresponding sound independently and cooperatively. Three types of sounds, synthesized single‐tone, multi‐tone, and instrumental, were used as sources. To know what factors affect the perception of the sound image, various test sound sets were prepared by varying an original sound set in amplitude or delay for each frequency for each loudspeaker. Eight subjects were asked to identify which sound image in a pair of test sounds was wider or farther than the other according to Scheffe's pair comparison method. The results shows that a test sound set with a de...