Spatial Hearing: The Psychophysics of Human Sound Localization

Spatial hearing refers to the capacity of listeners to infer information about direction and distance from auditory signals. Its study involves the overlap of acoustics, psychology, psychophysics, physiology, medicine, engineering, architectural design, and musical analysis, and its applications include the design of speaker systems, concert halls and other interiors, and the development of noise-reduction systems.

This book updates and expands an interdisciplinary survey and text first published in Germany in 1974. The Journal of the Institute for Radio Engineering wrote of the first edition that "the literature in this field is so fragmented and scattered that it is virtually inaccessible to most audio engineers, telecommunications technicians, and others for whom it is of vital interest. Thus it is all the more a pleasure to acclaim the author of this first comprehensive monograph, and to recognize how successful he has been in his lucid organization and presentation of so much information."

The first three chapters offer a general outline of the problem and approaches to its study (apparatus, experimental techniques, psychometric methods); a survey of experiments with a single sound source emitting signals over a range of frequencies and intensities; and a similar survey involving multiple sound sources and enclosed spaces.

A new fourth chapter has been added to this edition, reviewing work done since 1972. It includes material on the physics of the external ear, monoaural and interaural attributes of ear input signals, and applications to architectural acoustics and "dummy-head" stereophony. The book also includes an extensive and up to date bibliography.

The field of spatial hearing has exploded in the decade or so since Jens Blauert's classic work on acoustics was first published in English. This revised edition adds a new chapter that describes developments in such areas as auditory virtual reality (an important field of application that is based mainly on the physics of spatial hearing), binaural technology (modeling speech enhancement by binaural hearing), and spatial sound-field mapping. The chapter also includes recent research on the precedence effect that provides clear experimental evidence that cognition plays a significant role in spatial hearing. The remaining four chapters in this comprehensive reference cover auditory research procedures and psychometric methods, spatial hearing with one sound source, spatial hearing with multiple sound sources and in enclosed spaces, and progress and trends from 1972 (the first German edition) to 1983 (the first English edition) - work that includes research on the physics of the external ear and the application of signal processing theory to modeling the spatial hearing process. There is an extensive bibliography of more than 900 items.