Dynamic auditory cues can override even strong conflicting visual evidence
Evidence
An interesting experimental set-up called pseudophone localization is presented in Figure 12.14. Signals from microphones are reproduced through headphones so that the subject perceives sounds as if having ears at the positions of the microphones. A particularly confusing situation is achieved if the angle β is 180◦, so that the ears are effectively interchanged, resulting frontal sound sources generating auditory events behind the listener, and vice versa (Blauert, 1996). One of us (Ville Pulkki) had a striking experience with such a device. A person was talking in front of me at a distance of about one metre. When I rotated my head with the pseudophone in action, the auditory object jumped immediately to behind me. Although the talking mouth of the person was clearly visible in front, the auditory object remained behind. The dynamic cues thus overrode the visual cues in this case. — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 1460
Categorization
Category: Factual Claims
- CANDY: A great dinner-party fact: wearing reversed-ear pseudo-headphones made a visible talking person sound like they were behind you.
Related
- Dynamic auditory cues can override clear visual evidence of source location (similarity 0.88)
- Dynamic binaural head-movement cues override conflicting visual evidence of source location (similarity 0.87)
- Vision dominates hearing in localization, identification, and size judgment (similarity 0.79)
- Headphone experiments reveal auditory abilities that free-field studies cannot expose. (similarity 0.79)
- Headphone reversal changes the sound pattern yet not what listeners report hearing (similarity 0.78)
- Each person’s directional hearing cues are learned and specific to their own ears (similarity 0.78)
- Head movements resolve front-back ambiguity by creating direction-specific binaural cue changes (similarity 0.78)