Room reverberation improves rather than impairs distance judgment

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

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• XREF: Reverses the intuition that reflections muddy perception; connects to how reverbs in audio production are engineered, and complements the decolouration claim at 1520.

Related

• More reverberation relative to direct sound makes listeners judge a source as farther away. (similarity 0.93)
• Reverberant sound stays constant across a room while direct sound falls with distance (similarity 0.88)
• Room acoustics smear directional perception and mask recorded reverberation (similarity 0.88)
• Relative loudness change provides the key auditory cue for source distance (similarity 0.87)
• Sound from a source falls 6 dB per distance doubling until reverberation takes over (similarity 0.87)
• Reverberator pre-delay controls perceived source distance independently of loudness ratio (similarity 0.87)
• Reverberant fields supply most perceived loudness in normal rooms (similarity 0.86)
• Reverberant sound level stays constant with listener position while direct sound fades with distance (similarity 0.86)
• Moving away from a source makes reverberant sound progressively dominate while it stays constant (similarity 0.86)
• Reverberant sound level stays constant with listener position because reflections arrive from all directions (similarity 0.85)
• Room boundaries alter loudspeaker output through reflected image sources (similarity 0.85)
• Echoes and reverberation convey room geometry and surface properties to listeners (similarity 0.85)
• Non-environment rooms suppress all but direct sound for clearer audio detail and imaging (similarity 0.85)
• Room reverberation barely affects early reflection audibility but strongly elevates late-reflection thresholds (similarity 0.84)
• Reverberant rooms make loudspeaker directivity important for sound quality (similarity 0.84)