Speaker
Description
In recent years, numerous studies have investigated the plausibility of binaural rendering. Typically, the auralized sound sources are assumed to have point-source characteristics and static directivity. While this can be considered a good representation of loudspeakers, which typically have a well-defined acoustic center and time-invariant directivity, other natural sound sources, such as the human voice, may have different properties.This study presents the results of an initial listening experiment that determined the relevance of the ’source width’ aspect when considering the sound radiation of human speakers. The experiment assessed static binaural recordings of frontally positioned human speakers in an anechoic environment using several attributes from the Spatial Audio Quality Inventory (SAQI). Two human speakers each articulated two different sentences at distances of 1.5 m and 3 m to the listener. The stimuli were compared to the reference of the same human speakers themselves articulating the same sentence. Visual cues were removed by placing a curtain between the speakers and the listeners. Two variants were analyzed: in the first, the binaural recording was presented dichotically; in the second, the left-ear signal was presented diotically to both ears. This diotic presentation of equal signals to both ears can be considered comparable to the perception of a frontal, horizontally non-distributed sound source.The results of the listening experiment revealed no significant differences in the considered SAQI attributes between the two variants, suggesting that representing a human speaker by a point-like sound source with a defined acoustic center is sufficient for plausible binaural rendering.