The effect of visual representation of a room on perceived reverberation

Abstract

In everyday environments, sound reflections from walls and other objects arrive at the listener’s ear in addition to the direct sound radiated from a source. Humans have evolved mechanisms to perceptually suppress distracting early reflections, summarized as the precedence effect. Visual information of the surroundings influences the effectiveness of this mechanism. It has also been shown that similar compensation effects can occur for later reflections and reverberation, and that humans can estimate acoustic properties of a room from the visual impression. Taking these findings together, we hypothesize that the visual impression of a room affects the perception of its reverberation. The hypothesis was tested in a highly immersive audio-visual virtual reality environment consisting of a horizontal loudspeaker array in an acoustically treated chamber and a head-mounted display. In a magnitude estimation paradigm, subjects judged the perceived degree of reverberation in conditions where the simultaneously presented acoustic and visual stimuli were either matched regarding the room, sound source azimuth, and sound source distance, or diverged in one of those aspects. Audio-only control conditions served as a baseline. Preliminary results from six subjects suggest a predominant reliance on auditory input when quantifying perceived reverberation even in audio-visually conflicting conditions.