Effects on perception of auditory illusions

• Applicant: Professor Dr.-Ing. Karlheinz Brandenburg
• Subject Area: Acoustics
• Term: from 2013 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 239150888

The development of recording and playback systems is motivated by the goal to create a perfect auditory illusion. In the last decades audio systems like ambisonics, wave field synthesis and binaural headphone playback gained in importance. Efforts are made to increase the quality of such systems. Despite the years of research and development, there are still many perceptual effects and psychoacoustical factors which are still unknown or not fully understood. This project deals with the systematical analysis of perceptual effects regarding binaural playback. Listening tests are planned to measure features of quality. Based on these findings a measurement model on the perception of binaural synthesized scenes is developed. The plausibility of a binaural auralisation significantly depends on contextual factors. To measure this influence, a set of quality features need to be determined and evaluated. These quality features and their weightings can be summarized as plausibility of perception. During the project several different auditive scenes are created for evaluation. The factors which influence the quality of features are varied. Different rooms for playback and recording are considered as well as variations of the complexity of the acoustical scene, the degree of personalization and the type of visual presentation. Because of the many degrees of freedom, pretests and interviews with experts are conducted to determine the most influential factors. In further listening test the perceptual effects of these factors are measured. Dependencies between these effects are expected and are going to be evaluated. In the next step, the effects are weighted corresponding to their importance for creating a plausible auditive illusion. To carry out the large amount of listening tests for each quality feature, a specific test methodology needs to be developed.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Participating Institution: Fraunhofer-Institut für Digitale Medientechnologie (IDMT)