The percept of reverberation is not affected by visual room impression in virtual environments.

Michael Schutte,Stephan D Ewert,Lutz Wiegrebe

doi:10.1121/1.5093642

Abstract

Humans possess mechanisms to suppress distracting early sound reflections, summarized as the precedence effect. Recent work shows that precedence is affected by visual stimulation. This paper investigates possible effects of visual stimulation on the perception of later reflections, i.e., reverberation. In a highly immersive audio-visual virtual reality environment, subjects were asked to quantify reverberation in conditions where simultaneously presented auditory and visual stimuli either match in room identity, sound source azimuth, and sound source distance, or diverge in one of these aspects. While subjects reliably judged reverberation across acoustic environments, the visual room impression did not affect reverberation estimates.

Highlights

Our awareness of space, and subsequent orientation and navigation in space is dominated by the visual system, relying on the high-resolution topographic representation of space on the retinae of our eyes
The current data show that the subjects could reliably judge the degree of reverberation of a presented virtual environment
Considering the dominance of the visual system in spatial awareness and its established influence on the perception of single echoes, it might on the one hand appear surprising that judgements of a room-related attribute of sound are entirely unaffected by congruent or incongruent visual input

Summary

Introduction

Subsequent orientation and navigation in space is dominated by the visual system, relying on the high-resolution topographic representation of space on the retinae of our eyes. Our auditory system can contribute: While the visual field is limited to the viewing direction, spatial hearing is omnidirectional, often guiding head and eye orientation. While some aspects of the precedence effect can be explained as by-products of peripheral auditory processing (Hartung and Trahiotis, 2001), several studies have demonstrated a high-level, cognitive contribution to precedence (Bishop et al, 2014; Clifton, 1987; Clifton and Freyman, 1989; Clifton et al, 2002; Tolnai et al, 2014)

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