Specific outcomes from the project

Application and evaluation

Evaluation of frequency and loudness compensations

Summary

The techniques to compensate for differences in frequency and loudness between stimuli discussed above were evaluated. This indicated that these methods improved the accuracy of the perceived width measurements by a large amount.

Detail

As discussed above, a number of methods have been derived to compensate for differences in frequency and loudness between stimuli; factors that can also affect the perceived auditory source width. Once these were implemented in the binaural hearing model, the effectiveness and accuracy of this was evaluated.

An experiment was undertaken that included stimuli of a wide range of frequencies, a wide range of IACC values and a wide range of loudnesses. The subjects judged the width of each of these, and this was compared to the measured results, both with and without the compensations for loudness and frequency. It was found that the match between the objective and subjective results was poor without the compensations for loudness and frequency. Once these compensations were added, the subjective and objective results were highly correlated, indicating that the compensations were effective and accurate.

Reference

[Mason et al 2004d]

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