Perception of reverberation in large single and coupled volumes

Abstract

Presented at the 15th International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD2009), Copenhagen, Denmark, May 18-22, 2009The aim of the presented research is to quantify how sensitive the human ear is to subtle changes in reverberation. We quantified the discrimination thresholds for reverberations that are representative for large rooms such as concert halls (reverberation times around 1.8 s). For exponential decays, simulating an ideal simple room, thresholds are around 6% (Experiment 1). We found no difference in thresholds between a short noise burst and a male voice spoken word, suggesting that discrimination is not dependent on the type, or spectral content, of the sound source (Experiment 2). In a final experiment we matched coupled room, non-exponential decay stimuli to exponential ones, and vice versa, in an attempt to quantify the complex former in terms of the simpler latter