Determination of optimal HRTFs for binaural synthesis

Abstract

Earlier studies have shown that a carefully selected human substituting an artificial head can minimize the amount of localization errors for a group of people in a listening experiment, thus indicating that a set of head-related transfer functions (HRTFs) can be found, which to some extent fits a population. This study aims at exploring ways of designing such general sets of HRTFs suitable for larger populations. An effort is put into considering the importance of, e.g., different frequency regions of the transfer functions in order to focus on the most general characteristics and avoid focusing attention on highly individual features. The physical origin of the different parts of the HRTFs will be taken into consideration, and HRTF design methods using parameters derived through signal analysis will be studied.