Spatial Hearing

Welcome to spatialhearing.org - A blog about spatial hearing !

This site is dedicated to the science of spatial hearing: what it is, why it's important, and how it can be affected by aging, hearing loss, and brain dysfunction. Here you will find posts from international experts, reporting on recent findings, new papers, and current directions in the field. Find the blog at http://spatialhearing.org or follow us on twitter @SpatialHearing.

What else is here?

A paper "Toward objective measures of auditory co-immersion in virtual and augmented reality." This paper was presented by Chris Stecker at the recent 2nd AES International Conference on Audio for Virtual and Augmented Reality (AVAR), Redmond WA Aug 20-22 2018. http://www.spatialhearing.org/spacelab/reprints/stecker2018avar.pdf
A short story about binaural listening agents and hearing aids of the future, posted in Dr. Stecker's blog on Hearables and Auditory Virtual and Augmented Reality.
SpatialHearing.org also hosts the Remote Testing Wiki, a production of the Acoustical Society of America P&P Task Force on Remote Testing.
Not really part of this blog, but here is a shortcut to the FRL AV Speech Corpus, and the JASA paper that describes it: (Kishline, Colburn, and Robinson 2020)

Hosting for spatialhearing.org is provided by Auditory Space, LLC.

What is spatial hearing?

Posted by on Jul 28 2016 in Background

Spatial hearing refers to listeners' perception of the locations of sound sources, the environment that contains them, and their own orientation within that environment. There are many different facets to spatial hearing, including sound localization (can you point to a sound source with your eyes closed?), segregation (can you tell that two sounds have different locations?), perception of moving sounds or one's own motion through space, multisensory perception (does seeing a talker influence where you hear them?), and reverberation perception (can you tell, just from listening, what kind of room you are standing in?).

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Why is spatial hearing important?

Posted by on Jul 28 2016 in Background

Spatial hearing allows us to localize sounds in our environment. This is an important aspect of directing spatial attention toward important events, and directing our eyes toward objects of interest. For animals, sound localization can be vital for finding prey, or knowing which way to run when escaping predators.

Less obviously, spatial hearing also helps us to understand important sounds, like speech.

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How is spatial hearing affected by impairment?

Posted by on Jul 29 2016 in Background

Hearing loss is typically experienced as reduced sensitivity to sounds, possibly more so at some frequencies than others, or more in one ear than the other. There are many different causes of hearing loss, such as conductive hearing loss (sound does not properly reach the ear) and sensorineural hearing loss (damaged hair cells of the inner ear do not send a strong signal to the brain), but the key issue is that the audibility of sounds is reduced. In many cases, hearing aids that amplify the affected frequencies can partially restore audibility.

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