What Perception Implies about Implementation of Interactive Acoustic Environments

Virtual acoustics, also known as 3-D sound and auralization, is the simulation of the complex acoustic field experienced by a listener within an environment. Going beyond the simple intensity panning of normal stereo techniques, the goal is to process sounds so that they appear to come from particular positions in three-dimensional space. Current techniques use digital signal processing to synthesize the acoustical properties that people use to localize a sound source. This paper briefly reviews these techniques as well as the results of a number of psychoacoustical studies designed to validate the synthesis. In particular, the relationship between the results of recent perceptual studies on the role of head motion to the implementation of interactive spatial audio systems is addressed.