Psychoacoustics and classroom acoustics: New possibilities for interaction

Abstract

For more than a century, psychoacoustics has contributed to our understanding of how humans perceive sound and how the human auditory system encodes sound. Although general knowledge from psychoacoustics is clearly relevant to classroom acoustics, relatively little research has directly linked these two areas of study. Perhaps the closest link is in the detection and perception of a single ideal acoustic reflection, where psychoacoustics has documented effects of various factors, such as reflection delay, reflection direction, and source material. Of course, real rooms are vastly more complex acoustically, and thus, the psychoacoustic complexities already evident with single reflections surely multiply in real rooms. Historically, there have also been challenges in the experimental control of relevant room acoustic parameters. Virtual acoustics has largely solved this problem, but detailed scientific study of the perceptual aspects of room acoustics still involves exploring a very large parameter space, which can be prohibitively time-intensive for human subjects testing. Here, a computational modeling approach based on psychoacoustic principles is described that greatly facilities parameter space exploration. The modeling is applied to the problem of determining reverberation detection threshold, which provides critical and missing basic information regarding the limits of human sensitivity to room reverberation.