Comparison of sound location variations in free and reverberant fields: An event-related potential study

Abstract

This study compares event-related potentials (ERPs) elicited by variations of sound location in free and reverberant fields. The virtual sound sources located at azimuths 0°–40° were synthesized with head-related transfer functions and binaural room impulse responses for free and reverberant fields, respectively. The sound stimulus at 0° was assigned as standard in the oddball paradigm. Results show that the P3 amplitude is larger in the free field and acoustical conditions have no significant effect on the amplitudes of N2 and mismatch negativity. Moreover, a linear relationship between sound angle and amplitude of ERP components is observed.

Indoor Sound Source Localization via Inverse Element-Free Simulation Based on Joint Sparse Recovery

“…This is a key problem faced by most methods when used for indoor environments, where sound propagation is subjected to the multipath effect due to reflections from walls. In indoor environments, conventional methods suffer from many problems, such as low robustness in the reverberant field and confusion about the time of arrival, thereby degrading the performance and applicability of these methods substantially [3]. Another frequent assumption in localization methods is that the sound sources are in the far field, which means that the wavefront generated by a source arrives at all microphones from the same direction.…”