Auditory space perception

Abstract

We have begun a series of experiments in the general area of localization or auditory space perception. In these experiments, listeners hear sounds one at a time (either in free field or via headphones) from 20 or more source positions, and make judgments of the relative spatial distance between pairs of sounds. In the free-field conditions, the sounds are transduced by small loudspeakers (the responses of which are digitally flattened and matched) hung in an anechoic chamber. In the headphone conditions, the stimuli are digitally filtered to simulate a free-field listening condition. The listener's distance judgments are subjected to a multidimensional scaling analysis, which produces a three-dimensional representation of the listener's responses. This scaling solution is interpreted as reflecting certain features of the listener's auditory space. In the initial control experiments, using free-field presentations of wideband noise burst stimuli, the scaling solutions obtained from five listeners (in a triadic comparison paradigm) matched the actual physical arrangement of the sources with correlations of better than 0.95. [Research supported by NSF.]