TY - GEN
T1 - Effect of Acoustic Scene Complexity and Visual Scene Representation on Auditory Perception in Virtual Audio-Visual Environments
AU - Fichna, Stefan
AU - Biberger, Thomas
AU - Seeber, Bernhard U.
AU - Ewert, Stephan D.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 IEEE.
PY - 2021
Y1 - 2021
N2 - In daily life, social interaction and acoustic communication often take place in complex acoustic environments (CAE) with a variety of interfering sounds and reverberation. For hearing research and the evaluation of hearing systems, simulated CAEs using virtual reality techniques have gained interest in the context of ecological validity. In the current study, the effect of scene complexity and visual representation of the scene on psychoacoustic measures like sound source location, distance perception, loudness, speech intelligibility, and listening effort in a virtual audio-visual environment was investigated. A 3-dimensional, 86-channel loudspeaker array was used to render the sound field in combination with or without a head-mounted display (HMD) to create an immersive stereoscopic visual representation of the scene. The scene consisted of a ring of eight (virtual) loudspeakers which played a target speech stimulus and non-sense speech interferers in several spatial conditions. Either an anechoic (snowy outdoor scenery) or echoic environment (loft apartment) with a reverberation time (T60) of about 1.5 s was simulated. In addition to varying the number of interferers, scene complexity was varied by assessing the psychoacoustic measures in isolated consecutive measurements or simultaneously. Results showed no significant effect of wearing the HMD on the data. Loudness and distance perception showed significantly different results when they were measured simultaneously instead of consecutively in isolation. The advantage of the suggested setup is that it can be directly transferred to a corresponding real room, enabling a 1:1 comparison and verification of the perception experiments in the real and virtual environment.
AB - In daily life, social interaction and acoustic communication often take place in complex acoustic environments (CAE) with a variety of interfering sounds and reverberation. For hearing research and the evaluation of hearing systems, simulated CAEs using virtual reality techniques have gained interest in the context of ecological validity. In the current study, the effect of scene complexity and visual representation of the scene on psychoacoustic measures like sound source location, distance perception, loudness, speech intelligibility, and listening effort in a virtual audio-visual environment was investigated. A 3-dimensional, 86-channel loudspeaker array was used to render the sound field in combination with or without a head-mounted display (HMD) to create an immersive stereoscopic visual representation of the scene. The scene consisted of a ring of eight (virtual) loudspeakers which played a target speech stimulus and non-sense speech interferers in several spatial conditions. Either an anechoic (snowy outdoor scenery) or echoic environment (loft apartment) with a reverberation time (T60) of about 1.5 s was simulated. In addition to varying the number of interferers, scene complexity was varied by assessing the psychoacoustic measures in isolated consecutive measurements or simultaneously. Results showed no significant effect of wearing the HMD on the data. Loudness and distance perception showed significantly different results when they were measured simultaneously instead of consecutively in isolation. The advantage of the suggested setup is that it can be directly transferred to a corresponding real room, enabling a 1:1 comparison and verification of the perception experiments in the real and virtual environment.
KW - Complex acoustic environments
KW - Head-mounted display
KW - Psychoacoustics
KW - Virtual acoustic environments
KW - Virtual reality
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85123185587&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/I3DA48870.2021.9610916
DO - 10.1109/I3DA48870.2021.9610916
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85123185587
T3 - 2021 Immersive and 3D Audio: From Architecture to Automotive, I3DA 2021
BT - 2021 Immersive and 3D Audio
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
T2 - 2021 Immersive and 3D Audio: From Architecture to Automotive, I3DA 2021
Y2 - 8 September 2021 through 10 September 2021
ER -