Cone of confusion makes time and level cues ambiguous for elevation

Evidence

At least in principle, the ITD and ILD do not change when changing the position of a sound source on a cone of confusion. This means that decoded values of the ITD and the ILD do not resolve the direction from which the sound arrives at the listener, since the same cue values are produced by sound arriving from any direction specified by the surface of the cone. The fact that we can perceive the front–back dimension quite well and the elevation angle correctly indicates that there must be effective mechanisms for resolving the direction inside the cones of confusion. There are two mechanisms by which we perceive the elevation correctly, the analysis of spectral cues and the utilization of dynamic cues, which will now be discussed. — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 1449

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains the cone-of-confusion problem motivating spectral and dynamic localization cues.