Psychophysical factors of spatial impression

Abstract

Spatial impression (or spaciousness) is an important perceptual attribute in room acoustics, implying (1) the sensation of a listener in a concert hall of being enveloped by the sound field and (2) the perceived broadening of the sound source. A psychophysical experiment will be reported using dichotic presentation of (filtered) white noise, in which the influence on spatial impression was investigated of three signal variables, viz., the interaural correlation, the center frequency, and the relative bandwidth of the filtered versions of the noise. Eight untrained subjects participated in a scaling experiment: They were presented 4 times with 80 (4*5*4) experimental conditions; subjective criterion was the perceived width of the sound image. The raw ordinal data were analyzed by canonic correlation analysis (CANALS); on the resulting data, ANOVA was applied. The main outcome of the experiment is that the interaural correlation and the center frequency are independent and adequate predictors of spatial impression. This result and the results of other experiments will be interpreted in the context of existing binaural theories. [Work supported by the Netherlands Organization for the Advancement of Pure Research (ZWO).]