A comparison of spatial listening in a soundbooth versus an immersive virtual environment

A comparative study of spatial listening in a soundbooth versus an immersive virtual environment was conducted to better understand whether the results of soundbooth studies can be generalized to real life. A target sentence and two competing sentences drawn from the sentences recorded by four males for the Coordinate Response Measure were presented concurrently to the listeners from three different locations. All participants completed 8 sessions in each of two conditions. The two conditions differed in terms of the test environment, while each session consisted of 4 blocks of 30 trials. In both test environments, performance was best when listeners were certain about the location of the target and performance declined as location certainty decreased. The largest difference in performance between the two test environment conditions was only 4.6 percentage points.