More reverberation relative to direct sound makes listeners judge a source as farther away.

Evidence

The second distance cue in the list above is the effect of room reflections and reverberation. In everyday acoustic environments, the signals in the ear canals of a listener consist of direct sound and also a considerable amount of reflections from walls or obstacles and reverberation due to repeated reflections. In such conditions, can take advantage of the room cues and is typically more accurate than in free-field conditions (Nielsen, 1993; Zahorik et al., 2005). Research on psychoacoustics often mentions the direct-to-reverberant ratio as a cue for distance perception. The more there is reverberant sound energy compared to direct sound energy, the farther away the listener perceives the source to be. — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 1525

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Distance from a source changes the balance between direct and reverberant sound — David Howard, Jamie Angus, coustics and Psychoacoustics, 2437; Reverberator pre-delay controls perceived source distance independently of loudness ratio — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 1527; Room reverberation improves rather than impairs distance judgment

Broader Connections

• Distance from a source changes the balance between direct and reverberant sound #expands (0.95) — David Howard, Jamie Angus, coustics and Psychoacoustics, 2437
• Reverberator pre-delay controls perceived source distance independently of loudness ratio #corroborates (0.90) — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 1527
• Room reverberation improves rather than impairs distance judgment #contradicts (0.85)