Differentiating Sensations of Sound Envelopment in Spatial Sound Synthesis Approaches: an Explorative Study

Schmele T, Filippi ED. Differentiating Sensations of Sound Envelopment in Spatial Sound Synthesis Approaches: an Explorative Study. In: Convention Paper. Audio Engineering Society; 2025. Paper 10251. Available from: https://aes.org/publications/elibrary-page/?id=23095

@inproceedings{Schmele2025_23095,
  author = {Schmele, Timothy and Filippi, Eleonora De},
  title = {{Differentiating Sensations of Sound Envelopment in Spatial Sound Synthesis Approaches: an Explorative Study}},
  note = {Paper 10251},
  year = {2025},
  month = oct,
  publisher = {Audio Engineering Society},
  url = {https://aes.org/publications/elibrary-page/?id=23095}
}

TY  - CPAPER
TI  - Differentiating Sensations of Sound Envelopment in Spatial Sound Synthesis Approaches: an Explorative Study
AU  - Schmele, Timothy
AU  - Filippi, Eleonora De
M1  - Paper 10251
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/10/14
UR  - https://aes.org/publications/elibrary-page/?id=23095
PB  - Audio Engineering Society
LA  - en
AB  - Investigating the enveloping effect of room acoustics has a long history, while research on the perceptual effects related to creative spatialization methods, often used in electroacoustic music, remains relatively scarce. These include spectral methods that distribute each frequency bin into a separate location in space, or temporal methods, where each grain of audio is given an individual position. Recently, a technique to synthesize sound spectra using nothing but spatial transformations has been presented that claims to decorrelate the sound spatially using high angular velocities. Backed by an extensive literature review, this study invited 18 expert listeners to evaluate these creative spatialization approaches on a horizontal 8 channel circular array across 6 perceptual dimensions related to envelopment using 3 different types of source sounds. In particular, it investigated if different spatial sound synthesis techniques can be considered perceptually unique in their spatialization approach.The results are significant, showing strong effects across all dimensions for all approaches chosen. Pairwise comparison also indicates that each creative spatialization technique might be indeed unique in its approach to create spatial impressions, but future work and standardization will be necessary.
ER  -