Proceedings of the 10th Convention of the
European Acoustics Association
Forum Acusticum 2023


Politecnico di Torino
Torino, Italy
September 11 - 15, 2023





Session: A11-01: Spatial Hearing: Modeling and Applications - Part I
Date: Monday 11 September 2023
Time: 17:20 - 17:40
Title: Model-Based Assessment of Spectral Weighting Schemes for Median-Plane Localisation
Author(s): P. Lladó, Acoustics Lab, DICE, Aalto University, Otakaari 5, 02150 Espoo, Finland
P. Majdak, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Wohllebengasse 12-14, A-1040 Vienna, Austria
R. Barumerli, Acoustics Research Institute, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Wohllebengasse 12-14, 1040 Vienna, Austria
R. Baumgartner, Acoustics Lab, DICE, Aalto University, Otakaari 5, 02150 Espoo, Finland
Pages: 311-314
DOI: https://www.doi.org/10.61782/fa.2023.0694
PDF: https://dael.euracoustics.org/confs/fa2023/data/articles/000694.pdf
Conference proceedings
Abstract

Monaural spectral cues help humans to localise sound-sources in sagittal planes. These spectral cues mainly originate from the direction-specific filtering of the pinnae to the sound. While there is evidence that certain spectral regions contain crucial information used by the auditory system to infer the direction of the sound source, previous studies suggest that certain frequency regions are more important than others. To test this hypothesis, a sagittal-plane auditory localisation model has been modified to adopt a spectral weighting scheme. This weighting scheme assigns relative importance to the spectral cues within a frequency region to analyse its effect on predicting listener-specific patterns of localisation responses. Various model variants, which differed on their assigned spectral weights, were compared by means of Bayesian model selection. Our results show that the preferred spectral weighting was listener-specific with no clear preference at group level. Thus, our findings suggest that listeners apply different decoding strategies of pinna cues for sound localisation.