engleski

Assessment of room size and position of the listener by normal sighted persons based on acoustic response of the room

As a part of a research conducted together with KU Leuven and Slovak Technical University in Bratislava, this paper investigates the possibility for a person with normal sight to estimate the size of an indoor space, i.e. a room, as well as to assess their position inside the room using only acoustical cues obtained from acoustical response of the room to an impulsive stimulus. Two experiments were designed, the first one dealing with room size estimation and the second one addressing the issue of egocentric localization. Both experiments utilize virtual environments defined in a room acoustics simulation software, in order to be able to change the acoustic treatment of the rooms in a well- defined manner, i.e. to use predefined values of the average absorption coefficient and to change the scattering coefficient of chosen room surfaces. The room size estimation experiment utilizes four rectangular rooms ; a small one with a size of an average room in an apartment, two middle-sized rooms with the same volume, but radically different shape, and a large room, with the ratio of room volumes of 1:8:64. The egocentric localization is investigated on three positions in the middle- sized, ordinarily shaped room only. Two impulsive stimuli used in the experiments are hand claps as a stationary source produced by persons themselves, and footsteps as a moving source produced by another person, both chosen as good representations of real-life situations. The listeners were chosen from the student population and had various level of knowledge on acoustics, music production and architecture. They received no specific training before the tests, but were guided only with their experience. Similar experiments were conducted at KU Leuven, where binaural reproduction over headphones was applied. In these experiments spatial reproduction over loudspeakers was utilized using 2nd order Ambisonics as a platform for encoding the sound field in a virtual environment and later reproduction. The results of the experiments have undergone statistical analysis, in order to determine the extent to which the abilities of egocentric localization and room size assessment are developed for normal sighted persons.

self- localization; room size assessment; virtual environment

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