The influence of signal type on perceived reverberance

Abstract

Currently, architectural room acoustic metrics make no real distinction between a room impulse response and the auditory system's internal representation of a room. These metrics are generally based on impulse responses, and indirectly assume that the internal representation of the acoustic features of a room is independent of the sound source. However, while a room can be approximated as a linear, time-invariant system, auditory processing is highly non-linear and varies a great deal over time in response to different acoustic inputs. Listeners were presented with various signals (clicks, long-duration noise, music, and speech) convolved with impulse responses consisting of Gaussian noises with different rates of exponential decay. Listeners were asked to adjust the reverberation time of one of the signals to match the other. Analyses of the data show that the source signal has a significant influence on perceived reverberance. Also, listeners were less accurate when matching reverberation times between different signals than they were with identical signals, suggesting that predicting subjective measures of reverberance from room impulse responses faces severe limitations that cannot be neglected. Results further suggest that the auditory system does not have a well-developed temporal representation of the diffuse reverb tail.

Assessing the perceived reverberation in different rooms for a set of musical instrument sounds

“…Such a source-filter characterization allows to characterize rooms as LTI systems. The results of this paper are in line with previous findings (Klockgether and van de Par, 2016;Teret et al, 2017) and may be used as evidence that the perception of room acoustic parameters depends on the context for which the room is used and this is contrary to the idea of an LTI system.…”

“…Evidence against the LTI assumption is given by Teret et al (2017), who asked 8 participants to match the perceived RT of subsequent signal pairs using either identical or different signals with varying degrees of reverberation. They found that the participants' responses were more accurate when the task was conducted with identical signals.…”

Recognizing individual concert halls is difficult when listening to the acoustics with different musical passages

“…Literature provides only indirect evidence for this matter. It has been observed that the absolute amount of perceived reverberation differs between different signal types, e.g., vocal stimuli are typically perceived more reverberant than stimuli without vocals (Frissen et al, 2009;Teret et al, 2017). Such inaccuracy in perceiving the absolute levels of room acoustic features with different source signals also possibly makes recognizing individual rooms more difficult.…”

Comparison of psychoacoustic-based reverberance parameters

“…The differences in calculation method lead to distinct advantages and disadvantages of the parameters. As P REV is based on a running signal, this parameter can account for the influence of sample on reverberance (Osses Vecchi et al, 2017), which can be an important contributor to reverberance (Teret et al, 2017). Furthermore, P REV can estimate different characteristics of reverberance (such as stopped reverberance, running reverberance, and overall reverberance) (Morimoto and Asaoka, 2004) on the basis of analysing a selected part of a sample, and can be calculated both from audio recordings and during a live concert situation.…”