The Influence of Listener's Background on Virtual Source Detection in a 6DoF Spatial Audio Task

Roy Chowdhury R, Meyer J, Picinali L. The Influence of Listener's Background on Virtual Source Detection in a 6DoF Spatial Audio Task. In: AVARIG 2026: Audio for Virtual and Augmented Reality and Immersive Games. Audio Engineering Society; 2026. Paper 10334. Available from: https://aes.org/publications/elibrary-page/?id=23296

@inproceedings{RoyChowdhury2026_23296,
  author = {Roy Chowdhury, Rahul and Meyer, Julie and Picinali, Lorenzo},
  title = {{The Influence of Listener's Background on Virtual Source Detection in a 6DoF Spatial Audio Task}},
  booktitle = {AVARIG 2026: Audio for Virtual and Augmented Reality and Immersive Games},
  note = {Paper 10334},
  year = {2026},
  month = jun,
  publisher = {Audio Engineering Society},
  url = {https://aes.org/publications/elibrary-page/?id=23296}
}

TY  - CPAPER
TI  - The Influence of Listener's Background on Virtual Source Detection in a 6DoF Spatial Audio Task
AU  - Roy Chowdhury, Rahul
AU  - Meyer, Julie
AU  - Picinali, Lorenzo
T2  - AVARIG 2026: Audio for Virtual and Augmented Reality and Immersive Games
M1  - Paper 10334
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/06/30
UR  - https://aes.org/publications/elibrary-page/?id=23296
PB  - Audio Engineering Society
LA  - en
AB  - The perceptual evaluation of spatial and immersive audio systems commonly relies on listening tests, where the role of listener-related factors is often treated as secondary. While previous studies have shown that listener expertise can influence performance in virtual audio tasks, this has not been systematically investigated in more complex mixed realvirtual and dynamic listening scenarios. This study examines the role of listener background in a six-degrees-of-freedom (6DoF) spatial detection task involving virtual and real sound sources. Eighteen participants identified the presence of a virtual speech source among concurrent targets and distractors while freely navigating a loudspeaker-based scene. Listener expertise was characterised using self-reported years of musical training, familiarity with immersive audio, and behavioural measures derived from signal detection theory (SDT), which were used to classify participants into expert and nave listener groups. Results show above-chance performance, with reduced accuracy in spatially adjacent conditions. Listeners with greater musical training and spatial audio experience achieved higher percent-correct scores. These findings are consistent with prior work on listener-dependent localisation performance, and extend them to a 6DoF mixed realvirtual context. The results highlight the importance of explicitly considering and reporting participant expertise in the design, analysis, and interpretation of spatial audio perception studies. Furthermore, the results indicate that experiments involving only expert listeners may not be accurately representative of the general population.
ER  -