FINITE ELEMENT DETERMINATION OF THE HEAD-RELATED TRANSFER FUNCTION

Abstract

The auditory peripheral system, which takes care of collection and enlargement in hearing processing, is an important part of the overall auditory system. This system is the key of sound source identification and location, and an important basis for a variety of audio equipment design and sound quality evaluation. In order to better recognize the acoustic characteristics of the auditory peripheral system, and effectively guide the audio equipment design as well as the sound quality evaluation, this study presents a numerical model based on the finite element/infinite element method (FEM/IFEM) to compute the near-field head-related transfer function (HRTF) on a reversed head model. A spherical sound source is positioned at different locations in the horizontal, median and lateral planes. The HRTFs and sound field distributions are computed for a frequency range up to 6 kHz. The present model is qualitatively validated against experimental data from MIT database. The results confirm the potentiality of the proposed approach which can efficiently detect the diffraction region, diffraction angle and tails in the sound field.