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Abstract : |
above or below the listener. This effect is achieved by using a better model of the human acoustic system, such as a dummy head with microphones embedded in the ears (Plenge, 1974). Because of the better model, the sound waves that arrive at the eardrums during playback are a close approximation of what would have actually arrived at a listener's eardrums during the original performance. Along with greater realism, binaural sound provides a number of other advantages over plain stereo. It conveys spatial information about each sound source to the listener. Furthermore, when sounds are spatially separated, a listener can easily distinguish different sources, and focus on those sources which are of interest while ignoring others. This is the so-called "cocktail party effect " (Cherry, 1953). If sounds can be recorded in this manner, an obvious next step is to convert monaural sounds to binaural sounds by artificially spatializing them. Given this ability, people who use sound in human-machine interfaces can gain the advantages that spatial sound offers. This goal has lead to research interest in the subject by the military, by NASA (Wenzel, et al, 1988), and by user interface designers (Ludwig, et al,, |
