Sound externalization in dynamic binaural listening: A comparative behavioral and EEG study.

Binaural reproduction aims at recreating a realistic sound scene at the ears of the listener using headphones. Unfortunately, externalization for frontal and rear sources is often poor (virtual sources are perceived inside the head, instead of outside the head). Nevertheless, previous studies have shown that large head-tracked movements could substantially improve externalization and that this improvement persisted once the subject had stopped moving his/her head.

Influence of head tracking on the externalization of speech stimuli for non-individualized binaural synthesis.

Binaural reproduction aims at recreating a realistic audio scene at the ears of the listener using headphones. In the real acoustic world, sound sources tend to be externalized (that is, perceived to be emanating from a source out in the world) rather than internalized (that is, perceived to be emanating from inside the head). Unfortunately, several studies report a collapse of externalization, especially with frontal and rear virtual sources, when listening to binaural content using non-individualized Head-Related Transfer Functions (HRTFs).

Ventriloquism effect with sound stimuli varying in both azimuth and elevation.

When presented with a spatially discordant auditory-visual stimulus, subjects sometimes perceive the sound and the visual stimuli as coming from the same location. Such a phenomenon is often referred to as perceptual fusion or ventriloquism, as it evokes the illusion created by a ventriloquist when his voice seems to emanate from his puppet rather than from his mouth. While this effect has been extensively examined in the horizontal plane and to a lesser extent in distance, few psychoacoustic studies have focused on elevation.