Conflicting visual and audio size cues make hybrid reverberation sound wrong.

Evidence

Interestingly, now that it is possible to provide a long reverberation time in a small room, via electronic reverberation enhancement systems, with good quality, people have found that long reverberation times in a small room sound “wrong” because the visual cues contradict the audio ones. That is, the listener, on the basis of the apparent size of the space and their experience, expects a shorter reverberation time than they are hearing. Apparently closing one’s eyes restores the illusion by removing the distracting visual cue! — David Howard, Jamie Angus, coustics and Psychoacoustics, 1876

Categorization

• QUESTION: The eyes-closed restoration claim is striking — worth chasing the original studies on cross-modal integration and expected reverberation.
• SEED: Article angle: how our expectations about room acoustics are learned from visual experience, and what happens when technology breaks that coupling — implications for virtual/augmented reality design.
• ADDENDUM: Relates to the reader’s standing interest in how environments encode meaning through sound (as in One Square Inch of Silence); here the visual environment encodes acoustic expectations.