Head-tracking with measured impulse responses strongly improves sound externalization

Evidence

A more elaborate scheme called Binaural Room Scanning (BRS) involves measuring binaural room impulse responses (BRIR) at each of many angular orientations of the mannequin in the test environment. For playback the music signal is convolved with the BRIR filters as it is reproduced through headphones attached to a low-latency head-tracking system. By this means, as the listener’s head rotates, the sounds at the ears are modified so as to maintain a stable spatial relationship with the real room. The result is a much more persuasive externalization of the sound and the associated spatial cues. — Toole, Floyd E, Sound reproduction- the acoustics and…, 1120

This can be fixed in head-tracked binaural audio where the localization cues are updated as the head position changes. The result is a stationary sound stage that appears more natural and externalized (Begault et al., 2001). — Toole, Floyd E, Sound reproduction- the acoustics and…, 1670

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to psychoacoustic modeling of spatial hearing and HRTF-based rendering — core to the reader’s stated goal.
• DEFINE: Defines Binaural Room Scanning (BRS) and BRIR as technical terms.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Toole, Floyd E, Sound reproduction- the acoustics and…, 1120; Toole, Floyd E, Sound reproduction- the acoustics and…, 1670