Psychoacoustic characterization of propagation effects in virtual environments

Abstract

As sound propagation algorithms become faster and more accurate, the question arises as to whether the additional efforts to improve fidelity actually offer perceptual benefits over existing techniques. Could environmental sound effects go the way of music, where lower-fidelity compressed versions are actually favored by listeners? Here we address this issue with two acoustic phenomena that are known to have perceptual effects on humans and that, accordingly, might be expected to heighten their experience with simulated environments. We present two studies comparing listeners' perceptual response to both accurate and approximate algorithms simulating two key acoustic effects: diffraction and reverberation. For each effect, we evaluate whether increased numerical accuracy of a propagation algorithm translates into increased perceptual differentiation in interactive virtual environments. Our results suggest that auditory perception does benefit from the increased accuracy, with subjects showing better perceptual differentiation when experiencing the more accurate rendering method: The diffraction experiment shows a more linearly decaying sound field (with respect to the diffraction angle) for the accurate diffraction method, while the reverberation experiment shows that more accurate reverberation, after modest user experience, results in near-logarithmic response to increasing room volume.

Sound Synthesis, Propagation, and Rendering: A Survey

“…Rungta et al [179] designed two experiments to analyze the psychoacoustic characterization of the sounding effects of diffraction and reverberation. They found that accurate Fig.…”

The Plausibility of a String Quartet Performance in Virtual Reality

“…Research on spatial audio reproduction technologies is richly varied and actively on-going -see [30] for a review, with solutions for virtual environments described, for example, in [31], and corresponding psychophysical studies reviewed in [32]. The methods employed in our experiment used state-of-the-art technology to simulate real-time three-dimensional audio spatialization and auralization [33].…”

Learning Acoustic Scattering Fields for Dynamic Interactive Sound Propagation

“…In addition to specular and diffuse effects, it is also important to simulate complex diffracted scattering, occlusions, and inter-reflections that are perceptible [17,31,33]. Prior geometric methods are accurate in terms of simulating high-frequency effects and can be augmented with approximate edge diffraction methods that may work well in certain cases [41,49], though their behavior can be erratic [36]. On the other hand, wave-based precomputation methods can accurately simulate these effects, but are limited to static scenes [33,34].…”