Perceptually Transparent Binaural Auralization of Simulated Sound Fields

TL;DR

This paper reviews and validates various wave-based binaural auralization methods, demonstrating that high-density sampling grids produce perceptually transparent sound reproduction under different acoustic conditions.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive summary and perceptual validation of binaural auralization techniques using volumetric sampling, highlighting the effectiveness of high-density grids.

Findings

All tested grids are perceptually transparent in reverberant conditions.

High-density spherical and cubical grids are effective in anechoic conditions.

Methods are openly available in the Chalmers Auralization Toolbox.

Abstract

Contrary to geometric acoustics-based simulations where the spatial information is available in a tangible form, it is not straightforward to auralize wave-based simulations. A variety of methods have been proposed that compute the ear signals of a virtual listener with known head-related transfer functions from sampling either the sound pressure or the particle velocity (or both) of the simulated sound field. This article summarizes the most common binaural auralization methods with and without intermediate ambisonic representation of volumetrically sampled sound pressure or sound pressure and particle velocity sampled on spherical or cubical surfaces and presents a perceptual validation thereof. A triangular test ($N=19$) confirmed that all evaluated grids resulted in a perceptually transparent auralization for the three tested sound incidence angles under reverberant conditions. Under anechoic conditions, only the high-density spherical and cubical surface grids lead to transparent auralization. All tested methods are available open source in the Chalmers Auralization Toolbox that accompanies this article.