A Platform for Evaluation of Synthetic Reflected Sounds on 3D Sound Localization

This study develops a 3D sound localization platform specialized in evaluating the effect of synthetic reflected sounds. 3D sound localization is one of the promising technologies to realize a more realistic digital-twin world, and reflected sounds are indispensable to pursue further reality. Although reflected sounds are well-known they strongly affect sound localization contributing to the realistic 3D sound field, it is still unclear why and how the reflected sounds affect perceptions of sound direction since there has been no such platform to evaluate the effect of reflected sounds on perceptions of sound direction. Our proposed platform implements imaginary sound sources by taking into account arrival time differences as reflected sounds from reflective walls using Head-Related Transfer Functions (HTRFs), and they are mixed with directly arrived sounds to evaluate the effect of reflected sounds on perceptions of the direction of sound sources. The experiments are conducted to prove the usefulness of the proposed platform evaluating parameters of sound reflections affecting perceptions of the direction of sound sources. The experimental results show the influences of reflected sounds varied according to the direction of reflected sounds, and our platform is expected in the future to demystify the various effects of reflected sounds on perceptions of the direction of sound sources.