Auditory Virtual
Evironment
The aim of an Auditory
Virtual Environment (AVE) is to create situations in which
humans have auditory perceptions that do not correspond to
their real environment but to a virtual one (Blauert 1997).
The main goal is a highly plausible or even natural reproduction.
The listener should have a spatial impression of the virtual
room and perceive his own movement inside the environment
and also the movements of the sound sources. An AVE may be
combined with other modalities, such as the visual and haptic
modality.
Depending on the application, the system to generate an AVE
is built differently: the user may be only a passive receiver
or he may interact with the environment. The design of an
AVE system has clearly to be listener-orientated. The perception
of the listener defines the design goals. Out of these design
goals it is necessary to find the best technical implementation.
An important approach to do this optimisation is to distinguish
between the auditory event in the perceptual domain and the
sound event in the physical domain and to describe the relation
between them by psychophysical functions. Additionally the
perception of a listener does not depend only on the external
stimuli. It is as well influenced by, e.g., the auditory experience,
the attention, and the expectations of the listener. Also
cross-modal effects have to be taken into account. (Blauert
2005)
Real-time systems developed at our institute:
References
Blauert J (1997). Spatial Hearing, The
Psychophysics of Human Sound Localisation (Second edition),
MIT Press, (Original German version 1974)
Blauert J ed. (2005). Communication Acoustics, Springer