Spatial Hearing in Echoic Environments
Abstract
In complex acoustic environments including command and control settings multiple acoustic sources vie for attention. The ability to locate and understand each acoustic signal is degraded by the presence of reverberant energy as well as the presence of competing sound sources. This study explored the effects of echoic energy on the ability to segregate analyze and localize communication signals. Results demonstrate that the human auditory system is able to cope with many of the degradations caused by room acoustics. When selectively attending to one sound in a mixture of sound the greatest perceptual contribution of spatially separating competing sound sources is in enhancing sound source segregation and allowing selective attention to be directed effectively. In anechoic space any salient feature that differentiates target from masker is sufficient to enable accurate segregation and selective attention. However features that would be redundant in anechoic space yield additive gains in reverberant space. Directional localization accuracy is degraded by reverberation while distance accuracy is enhanced. Collaborations with neurophysiologists and computational researchers lend insights into the mechanisms that contribute to how listeners process sound in complex reverberant environments.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Feb 29, 2008
- Accession Number
- ADA482250
Entities
People
- Barbara Shinn-Cunningham
Organizations
- Boston University