Attention focusing in complex acoustical environments

Abstract

The prediction of the perceived overall sound quality of environments consisting of multiple sound sources poses a challenge. The interaction of different sound events results in a great amount of sensory information to be processed but human cognitive capacity is limited. Therefore, listeners tend to focus attention on specific events, the choice of which is influenced not only by the available environmental information but also by the current tasks being performed and individual conditions. To investigate how human attention can be drawn to singular sound sources in complex environments and how this affects the overall evaluation, a series of listening experiments was carried out at Duesseldorf University of Applied Sciences. Participants were asked to evaluate the sound quality of different acoustical environments which consisted of varying combinations of environmental sounds. The most noticeable sound events were identified and were individually rated in the same evaluation. The results show that the overall pleasantness in a complex acoustical environment can be well explained based on the ratings of singular environmental sounds.