Sound localisation

robert bristow-johnson wrote:

>> Many people with all sorts of pinnae have listened to what mine have
>> done to impinging sound of considerable variety without once saying that
>> it doesn't sound right.  The universal reaction the first time is
>> astonishment at the reality of the experience.

I should add here that in two cases, the listener happened to be sitting 
next to me in the club as I did the recording.  They both felt that 
their original live listening experience had been very well captured.

> yeah, i can believe that.  are there finally a published standardized set of
> HRTFs (and IAD) that can well be used for sound navigating music or movie
> sound?  this would be a published set of frequency response curves (both
> magnitude and phase, i s'pose) as a function of different zenith and azimuth
> angles of the source.  

I'm not up on this any more but as of a few years ago there weren't any 
that were particularly useful but it looked like some would be emerging 
from work that was in progress.  There is a set by Bill Gardner with 
comprehensive coverage of the spatial angles but the problem is that, 
for whatever reason, they just don't sound good at all.  I think they 
were measured in anechoic conditions and while that might be useful for 
research purposes it isn't going to impart any realism.

> also, how sensitive is this from deviation from
> sitting in the "sweet spot"?

The sweet spot has to be attached to your head, i.e. 'phones, with canal 
'phones (IED's) being the best.  I've found the Sony ER71LP, a consumer 
IED, at under $70 to be very effective.

There has been some work done with a pair of speakers and crosstalk 
cancellation and I can't speak to its efficacy but the sweet spot would 
be a point and not a volume.  This would also suffer from a double 
pinnae effect in the case of binaural unless the setup compensated for 
the HRTF of the listener at that sweet spot.


Bob
-- 

"Things should be described as simply as possible, but no simpler."

                                              A. Einstein