Human hearing adapts to different room acoustics to preserve timbre perception

Evidence

The acoustics of listening rooms vary significantly. Car audio systems and headphones have very short or non-existent reverberation. Small rooms and big rooms produce very different room responses. These differences make the goal of providing an identical listening experience in every listening environment appear impossible to achieve. However, despite the great variations in listening room acoustics, a certain piece of audio ‘sounds’ very similar in many different listening conditions. Listeners are typically able to identify the sound sources of a musical piece, recognize, say, the vocalist, the lyrics, and the music itself correctly, although the signals in their ear canals may have very different spectral content in different rooms (Toole, 2012). The ability of human hearing to adapt to diverse listening room acoustics is remarkable, as discussed briefly in Sections 11. — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 1814

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader theme of silence and sound perception — the ear canal signal being radically different yet perception constant is a form of perceptual constancy like the figure-ground/adaptation ideas in The Soundscape. — connects to: Room acoustics act as a second system cascaded after the instrument — David M. Howard, Jamie Angus, Acoustics and Psychoacoustics, 1059