The influence of signal type on the internal representation of a room in the auditory system

Abstract

Currently, architectural acousticians make no real distinction between a room impulse response and the auditory system’s internal representation of a room. With this lack of a good model for the auditory representation of a room, it is indirectly assumed that our internal representation of a room is independent of the sound source needed to make the room characteristics audible. In a perceptual test, we investigate the extent to which this assumption holds true. Listeners are presented with various pairs of signals (music, speech, and noise) convolved with impulse responses for different rooms. They are asked to evaluate the differences between rooms and disregard differences between the source signals. Multidimensional scaling is used to determine the extent to which the source signal influences the internal representation of the room and which room acoustical characteristics are important/perceivable for each sound type.