An in-situ perceptual evaluation of spatial audio in an automotive environment

Bacila B, Orita M, Hahn N, Fazi F, Nelson P. An in-situ perceptual evaluation of spatial audio in an automotive environment. In: Convention Paper. Audio Engineering Society; 2025. Paper 10222. Available from: https://aes.org/publications/elibrary-page/?id=22858

@inproceedings{Bacila2025_22858,
  author = {Bacila, Bogdan and Orita, Mihai and Hahn, Nara and Fazi, Filippo and Nelson, Philip},
  title = {{An in-situ perceptual evaluation of spatial audio in an automotive environment}},
  note = {Paper 10222},
  year = {2025},
  month = may,
  publisher = {Audio Engineering Society},
  url = {https://aes.org/publications/elibrary-page/?id=22858}
}

TY  - CPAPER
TI  - An in-situ perceptual evaluation of spatial audio in an automotive environment
AU  - Bacila, Bogdan
AU  - Orita, Mihai
AU  - Hahn, Nara
AU  - Fazi, Filippo
AU  - Nelson, Philip
M1  - Paper 10222
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/05/12
UR  - https://aes.org/publications/elibrary-page/?id=22858
PB  - Audio Engineering Society
LA  - en
AB  - This paper investigates the perceptual variation of three spatial audio attributes in an automotive environment. In-situ listening tests were conducted to assess the horizontal localisation accuracy, surroundedness and source width of the audio system in the vehicle cabin, for both real and panned sound sources. The results show a general decrease in localisation accuracy as the position of the source changes from front towards the back of the car, but also highlight a few drawbacks of using panning methods which have a small sweet spot. The envelopment assessment showed that decorrelation of the sound sources significantly increases the perception of surroundedness, and it was also found that virtual re-panning of sources may be effective in increasing the surroundedness for continuous stimuli. The source width assessment showed that the panned stimuli did not exhibit a large variation in perceived width, It was, however, observed that the width of the individual audio channels showed a strong dependency on the horizontal angle. The results presented in this paper contribute to the further development of objective metrics suitable to predict the perceptual impression of individual spatial attributes in an automotive environment.
ER  -