Binaural room acoustics

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Room acoustics concerns the geometrical and materials properties of rooms as they determine measurable sound field parameters that are perceptually important to listeners. For example, the volume and absorption in a room determine the reverberation time, which is important to the comprehension of speech and the enjoyment of music. Binaural room acoustics concerns the properties of rooms as they affect measurable interaural parameters, important to the human binaural perceptual system. For example, room properties affect the short-term interaural cross-correlation, which is important to the perception of apparent source width. Our recent work emphasizes room effects on steady-state interaural level and phase differences, important to sound localization in the horizontal plane. Particularly, we have sought to give mathematical meaning to a “binaural critical distance.” If a sound source and a listener are separated by less than the binaural critical distance, there is good probability that the interaural differences correctly indicate whether the source is on the listener's left or right. Experimentally, we have focused on sine tones in the range 200–1200 Hz, but we expect the results to be more generally applicable. [Work supported by the AFOSR (grant 11NL002) and by the NSF REU program.]