Auditory perception of speaker's position, distance and fac- ing angle in a real enclosed environment ∗

In this work we investigate the auditory perception of the position, distance and facing angle of a directional acoustic source in a real enclosed environment by blindfolded listeners. A human speaker acted as an acoustic source at 12 defined positions and 4 defined facing angle in the azimuth. All combinations of position and facing angle were tested once. Blindfolded listeners judged the speaker’s facing angle and position after heard a spoken sentence. This procedure was performed twice, before and after a training phase. In the training phase, listeners were allowed to remove the blindfold and verify speaker’s conditions. Results are expressed in terms of the mean average of correct facing angle estimation ratio, position error, relative distance error and facing angle mean error of all participants. We note that at listeners’ near positions and frontal regions we obtain more confident results and a training phase, in general, improve the results.