Headphone simulation of free-field listening. II: Psychophysical validation

• Published in: The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America Vol. 85; no. 2; pp. 868 - 878
• Main Authors: WIGHTMAN, F. L, KISTLER, D. J
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Woodbury, NY Acoustical Society of America 01-02-1989; American Institute of Physics
• Subjects: Acoustic Stimulation; Amplifiers, Electronic; Audition; Auditory Perception - physiology; Biological and medical sciences; Female; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Humans; Male; Perception; Psychoacoustics; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Sound Localization - physiology; Human; Hearing; Free field; Simulation; Perception; Headphone; Localization; Psychophysics
• ISSN: 0001-4966; 1520-8524
• DOI: 10.1121/1.397558

Listeners reported the apparent spatial positions of wideband noise bursts that were presented either by loudspeakers in free field or by headphones. The headphone stimuli were digitally processed with the aim of duplicating, at a listener's eardrums, the waveforms that were produced by the free-field stimuli. The processing algorithms were based on each subject's free-field-to-eardrum transfer functions that had been measured at 144 free-field source locations. The headphone stimuli were localized by eight subjects in virtually the same positions as the corresponding free-field stimuli. However, with headphone stimuli, there were more front-back confusions, and source elevation seemed slightly less well defined. One subject's difficulty with elevation judgments, which was observed both with free-field and with headphone stimuli, was traced to distorted features of the free-field-to-eardrum transfer function.