FEASIBILITY OF MULTIPLE NON-SPEECH SOUNDS PRESENTATION USING HEADPHONES

This paper describes a study of listeners' ability to segregate spatially separated sources of non-speech sounds. Short sounds from musical instruments were played over headphones at different spatial positions using stereo panning or 3-D audio processing with Head-Related Transfer Functions. The number of sound positions was limited to five in this study. One, three or five sound items were played to the listener, multiple sounds being presented with four different onset times from simultaneous to successive replay. The subjects had to spatially discriminate one sound item, i.e. identify a given instrument and find its position. Performance was assessed by measure of response time and error-rate. A preference grading was also included in this test to compare the two headphone presentation techniques employed.

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