Auditory depth control using reverberation cue in virtual audio environment

Abstract

To provide the distance information of a sound source in virtual audio space, we must have some information about effective distance cues and there must be some way to handle them properly. It is well known that the conventional cues comprise loudness, spectral information, reverberation and binaural information. Some research works have shown that most of these cues can give listeners only limited distance information. Among these cues, reverberation can give listeners effective distance information, but the implementation using this cue is not a simple problem because there are no well-defined parameters and methods. This paper discusses methods to control the perceived auditory depth with the reverberation cue. A two-stepped linear envelope method and an artificial reverberator, which can control the early reflection slope of an impulse response but does not alter the reverberation time, are proposed as solutions. To validate these methods, subjective assessment was performed. © 2008 The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers.