Pervasive approach to acoustic source perception in horizontal plane

Abstract

Summary Acoustic is key facet in terms of sound related experiments on human subject. Perception plays an important role in performance of human under various environmental conditions. Perception of acoustic source accurately has advantages for performance of work by human. In this work acoustic source perception by human in horizontal plane is illustrated. For experiments to be performed in horizontal plane eleven Bluetooth enabled speaker (BES) tagged 1–11 numbers were placed evenly at 30° in a circular outline and input to BES was controlled with the help of computer. The sound level meter was used to check the accuracy of tagged BES. The experiment on sound perception was performed on 20 subjects (10 male, 10 female, 15 subjects aged 18–35, 5 subjects above 50), all of them have no issue of abnormal or defective hearing. The subjects have never participated in this type of experiment previously and provided with response measurement sheet (RMS). Two set of acoustic source perception experiments were designed for this study. In first experiment, buzz sound was used as acoustic source with low fixed frequency (LFF) of 2000 Hz and high fixed frequency (HFF) of 17 kHz. The experiments were performed for both LFF and HFF. Initially, set of LFF experiment was performed. The BES was sounded in arbitrary order, with each stimulus for 4 second. After each stimulus, subject was asked to point at BES from where sound is perceived and clearly writes the number of BES on the RMS provided. Similar set of HFF experiment was performed and recorded in RMS. In the second experiment white noise was added at same fixed frequency and similar task was repeated by the subjects and recorded in RMS. The data recorded from the two set of experiments was compared and analyzed. The results show the perception of acoustic source in horizontal plane is effected by the addition of white noise to the LFF and HFF.