Recent Papers on Hearing in Rooms
Lee, AKC and BG Shinn-Cunningham (2008). “Effects of reverberant spatial cues on attention-dependent object formation,” Journal of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology, 9, 150-160.
Kopco, N, V Best, and BG Shinn-Cunningham (2007). "Simulating distance cues in virtual reverberant environments," Proceedings of the International Congress on Acoustics, Madrid, Spain, 2-7 September 2007.
Naka, Y, A Oberai and Shinn-Cunningham, BG (2007). “Optimal space-time finite difference schemes for experimental booth design,” Proceedings of the International Congress on Acoustics, Madrid, Spain, 5-7 September 2007.
Choi, IY, BG Shinn-Cunningham, SB Chon, and K-M Song (2007). “Prediction of perceived quality in multi-channel audio compression coding systems,” Proceedings of the Audio Engineering Society 30th International Conference, Saariselka, Finland, 15-17 March 2007.
Devore, S, A Ihlefeld, BG Shinn-Cunningham, and B Delgutte (2006). “Neural and behavioral sensitivies to azimuth degrade with distance in reverberant environments,” Proc. of the International Symposium on Hearing, Cloppenberg, Germany, 382-388.
Naka, Y, A Oberai, and BG Shinn-Cunningham (2005). “Acoustic eigenvalues of rectangular rooms with arbitrary wall impedances using the interval Newton/generalized bisection method,” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 118(6), 3662-3671.
Ueno, K, N Kopco, and BG Shinn-Cunningham (2005). “Calibration of speech perception to room reverberation,” Proceedings of the Forum Acusticum, 29 August - 2 September 2005.
BG Shinn-Cunningham, Lin, I-F, T Streeter (2005). “Trading directional accuracy for realism,” Proceedings of the Human-Computer Interaction International 2005 / 1st International Conference on Virtual Reality, 22-27 July 2005.
Shinn-Cunningham, BG, N Kopco, and T Martin (2005). "Localizing nearby sound sources in a classroom: Binaural room impulse responses”, J Acoust Soc Am, 117, 3100-3115.
Shinn-Cunningham, BG (2004). “The perceptual consequences of creating a realistic, reverberant 3-D audio display,” Proceedings of the International Congress on Acoustics, Kyoto, Japan, 4-9 April 2004.
Naka, Y, A Oberai, and BG Shinn-Cunningham (2004). “The finite element method with the Dirichlet-to-Neumann map for sound-hard rectangular rooms,” Proceedings of the International Congress on Acoustics, Kyoto, Japan, 4-9 April 2004.
Shinn-Cunningham, BG and K Kawakyu (2003). “Neural representation of source direction in reverberant space," Proceedings of the 2003 IEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics, New Pfaltz, NY, October 2003, 79-82.
Shinn-Cunningham, BG and S Ram (2003). “Identifying where you are in room: Sensitivity to room acoustics,” in Proceedings of the International Conference on Auditory Display, Boston, MA, 6-9 July, 21-24.
Devore, S and BG Shinn-Cunningham (2003). “Perceptual consequences of including reverberation in spatial auditory displays,” in Proceedings of the International Conference on Auditory Display, Boston, MA, 6-9 July, 2003, 75-78.
Shinn-Cunningham, BG (2003). “Spatial hearing advantages in everyday environments,” in Proceedings of the ONR workshop on Attention, Perception, and Modeling for Complex Displays, Troy, New York, June 2003.
Shinn-Cunningham, BG (2003). “Acoustics and perception of sound in everyday environments,” in Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Spatial Media, Aizu-Wakamatsu, Japan, March 2003, 31-40.
Kopco, N, and BG Shinn-Cunningham (2002). “Auditory localization in rooms: Acoustic analysis and behavior,” in Proceedings of the 32nd International Acoustical Conference - EAA Symposium, Zvolen, Slovakia, 10-12 September 2002, 109-112.
Shinn-Cunningham, BG (2002). “Speech intelligibility, spatial unmasking, and realism in reverberant spatial auditory displays,” in Proceedings of the International Conference on Auditory Display, 2-5 July 2002, 183-186.
Shinn-Cunningham, BG, JG Desloge, and N Kopco (2001). “Empirical and modeled acoustic transfer functions in a simple room: Effects of distance and direction,” in Proceedings of the 2001 IEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics, New Pfaltz, NY, 19-24 October 2001, 419-423.
Shinn-Cunningham, BG (2001). “Localizing sound in rooms,” in Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH and Eurographics Campfire: Acoustic Rendering for Virtual Environments, Snowbird, Utah, 26-29 May 2001, 17-22.
Shinn-Cunningham, BG (2001). “Creating three dimensions in virtual auditory displays,” in Usability Evaluation and Interface Design: Cognitive Engineering, Intelligent Agents and Virtual Reality, MJ Smith, G Salvendy, D Harris, and RJ Koubek (eds.), New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaurm, 604-608.
Shinn-Cunningham, BG (2000). “Distance cues for virtual auditory space,” Proceedings of the IEEE 2000 International Symposium on Multimedia Information Processing, Sydney, Australia, 13-15 December, 2000, 227-230.
Shinn-Cunningham, BG (2000). “Learning reverberation: Considerations for spatial auditory displays,” in Proceedings of the International Conference on Auditory Display, Atlanta, GA, 2-5 April 2000, 126-134.
If you were to read a textbook describing how the brain computes source location, the process seems straightforward: differences in the signals reaching the ears allow the listener to determine left-right direction while spectral content is used to determine the up-down, front-back direction. However, in rooms, these spatial auditory cues are altered and distorted by echoes from walls and other surfaces. Acoustically, the effects of echoes are dramatic; however, perceptually, the auditory system copes with echoes quite well. Reverberation only modestly degrades directional hearing and improves distance perception. We are using a combination of acoustical, behavioral, and computational approaches to understand how the auditory system computes source location in the presence of reverberation. This work is important for understanding the neural computations underlying robust directional hearing in rooms and for determining what aspects of room acoustics provide cues for source distance.
