Automated Audio Realism Detection

User gaze locations are tracked during an artificial reality experience. Audio content that is spatialized to a target location is adjusted such that it is temporarily spatialized to a test location for a period of time and then reverts back to being spatialized at the target location. The spatialized audio content is presented concurrently with display of a virtual object at the target location. Over the period of time the audio content is spatialized to the test location and then reverts back to the target location and the level of realism of the artificial reality experience is evaluated using the tracked gaze locations during the period of time

Across-frequency combination of interaural time difference in bilateral cochlear implant listeners

The current study examined how cochlear implant (CI) listeners combine temporally interleaved envelope-ITD information across two sites of stimulation. When two cochlear sites jointly transmit ITD information, one possibility is that CI listeners can extract the most reliable ITD cues available. As a result, ITD sensitivity would be sustained or enhanced compared to single-site stimulation. Alternatively, mutual interference across multiple sites of ITD stimulation could worsen dual-site performance compared to listening to the better of two electrode pairs. Two experiments used direct stimulation to examine how CI users can integrate ITDs across two pairs of electrodes. Experiment 1 tested ITD discrimination for two stimulation sites using 100-Hz sinusoidally modulated 1000-pps-carrier pulse trains. Experiment 2 used the same stimuli ramped with 100 ms windows, as a control condition with minimized onset cues. For all stimuli, performance improved monotonically with increasing modulation depth. Results show that when CI listeners are stimulated with electrode pairs at two cochlear sites, sensitivity to ITDs was similar to that seen when only the electrode pair with better sensitivity was activated. None of the listeners showed a decrement in performance from the worse electrode pair. This could be achieved either by listening to the better electrode pair or by truly integrating the information across cochlear sites

DYNAMIC TORSO REFLECTION FILTERING FOR INTERACTIVE BINAURAL SPATIAL AUDIO BASED ON BIOLOGICALLY CONSTRAINED IMU DRIFT COMPENSATION

An audio uses information uses a biologically constrained IMU drift compensation for audio spatial rendering to drive a dynamic filtering process to better reproduce the acoustic effects of head on torso orientation on the HRTF

Accurate Sound Localization in Reverberant Environments Is Mediated by Robust Encoding of Spatial Cues in the Auditory Midbrain

In reverberant environments, acoustic reflections interfere with the direct sound arriving at a listener's ears, distorting the spatial cues for sound localization. Yet, human listeners have little difficulty localizing sounds in most settings. Because reverberant energy builds up over time, the source location is represented relatively faithfully during the early portion of a sound, but this representation becomes increasingly degraded later in the stimulus. We show that the directional sensitivity of single neurons in the auditory midbrain of anesthetized cats follows a similar time course, although onset dominance in temporal response patterns results in more robust directional sensitivity than expected, suggesting a simple mechanism for improving directional sensitivity in reverberation. In parallel behavioral experiments, we demonstrate that human lateralization judgments are consistent with predictions from a population rate model decoding the observed midbrain responses, suggesting a subcortical origin for robust sound localization in reverberant environments.National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant R01 DC002258)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant R01 DC05778-02)core National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Eaton Peabody Laboratory. (Core) Grant P30 DC005209)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant T32 DC0003

An auditory-visual tradeoff in susceptibility to clutter

Sensory cortical mechanisms combine auditory or visual features into perceived objects. This is difficult in noisy or cluttered environments. Knowing that individuals vary greatly in their susceptibility to clutter, we wondered whether there might be a relation between an individual's auditory and visual susceptibilities to clutter. In auditory masking, background sound makes spoken words unrecognizable. When masking arises due to interference at central auditory processing stages, beyond the cochlea, it is called informational masking. A strikingly similar phenomenon in vision, called visual crowding, occurs when nearby clutter makes a target object unrecognizable, despite being resolved at the retina. We here compare susceptibilities to auditory informational masking and visual crowding in the same participants. Surprisingly, across participants, we find a negative correlation (R = -0.7) between susceptibility to informational masking and crowding: Participants who have low susceptibility to auditory clutter tend to have high susceptibility to visual clutter, and vice versa. This reveals a tradeoff in the brain between auditory and visual processing.R01 DC019126 - NIDCD NIH HHS; R01 EY027964 - NEI NIH HHSAccepted manuscrip

FORUM:Remote testing for psychological and physiological acoustics

Acoustics research involving human participants typically takes place in specialized laboratory settings. Listening studies, for example, may present controlled sounds using calibrated transducers in sound-attenuating or anechoic chambers. In contrast, remote testing takes place outside of the laboratory in everyday settings (e.g., participants' homes). Remote testing could provide greater access to participants, larger sample sizes, and opportunities to characterize performance in typical listening environments at the cost of reduced control of environmental conditions, less precise calibration, and inconsistency in attentional state and/or response behaviors from relatively smaller sample sizes and unintuitive experimental tasks. The Acoustical Society of America Technical Committee on Psychological and Physiological Acoustics launched the Task Force on Remote Testing (https://tcppasa.org/remotetesting/) in May 2020 with goals of surveying approaches and platforms available to support remote testing and identifying challenges and considerations for prospective investigators. The results of this task force survey were made available online in the form of a set of Wiki pages and summarized in this report. This report outlines the state-of-the-art of remote testing in auditory-related research as of August 2021, which is based on the Wiki and a literature search of papers published in this area since 2020, and provides three case studies to demonstrate feasibility during practice

The effect of auditory spatial layout in a divided attention task

The effect of spatial separation on the ability of listeners to report keywords from two simultaneous talkers was examined. The talkers were presented with equal intensity at a clearly audible level, and were designed to have little spectral overlap in order to reduce energetic interference. The two talkers were presented in a virtual auditory environment with various angular separations around references of-45º, 0º, or 45º azimuth. In Experiment 1, the virtual space was created using head-related transfer functions (HRTFs) which contained natural energy variations as a function of location. In Experiment 2, these energy variations were removed and the virtual space was created using only interaural time differences (ITDs). Overall, performance did not vary dramatically but depended on spatial separation, reference direction, and type of simulation. Around the 0º reference azimuth, performance in the HRTF condition tended to first increase and then decrease with increasing separation. This effect was greatly reduced in the ITD condition and thus appears to be related primarily to energy variations at the two ears. For sources around the ± 45º reference azimuths, there was an advantage to separating the two sources in both HRTF and ITD conditions, suggesting that perceived spatial separation is advantageous in a divided attention task, at least for lateral sources. 1

Attending to Space or Intensity Modulates Spatial Release from Informational Masking

When trying to understand target speech in a background o