title: The role of diffusive architectural surfaces on auditory spatial discrimination in performance venues.
abstract: In musical or theatrical performance, some venues allow listeners to individually localize and segregate individual performers, while others produce a well blended ensemble sound. The room acoustic conditions that make this possible, and the psycho-acoustic effects at work are not fully understood. This research utilizes auralizations from measured and simulated performance venues to investigate spatial discrimination of multiple acoustic sources in rooms. Signals were generated from measurements taken in a small theater, and listeners in the audience area were asked to distinguish pairs of speech sources on stage with various spatial separations. This experiment was repeated with the proscenium splay walls treated to be flat, diffusive, or absorptive. Similar experiments were conducted in a simulated hall, utilizing 11 early reflections with various characteristics, and measured late reverberation. The experiments reveal that discriminating the lateral arrangement of two sources is possible at narrower separation angles when reflections come from flat or absorptive rather than diffusive surfaces.
authors.affiliation: Department of Media Technology, Aalto University School of Science, P.O. Box 15500, FI-00076 Aalto, Finland. philip.robinson@aalto.fi
authors.forename: Philip W
authors.initials: PW
authors.lastname: Robinson
authors.forename: Jukka
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Pätynen
authors.forename: Tapio
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Lokki
authors.forename: Hyung Suk
authors.initials: HS
authors.lastname: Jang
authors.forename: Jin Yong
authors.initials: JY
authors.lastname: Jeon
authors.forename: Ning
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Xiang
mesh_terms: D000162:Acoustics; D001108:Architecture; D001307:Auditory Perception; D005160:Facility Design and Construction; D006801:Humans; D009146:Music; D013017:Sound Localization; D013018:Sound Spectrography; D013067:Speech Perception; D013499:Surface Properties