Perceptually Transparent Binaural Auralization of Simulated Sound Fields

Abstract: Contrary to geometric acoustics-based simulations where the spatial information is available in a tangible form, it is not straightforward to auralize wave-based simulations. A variety of methods have been proposed that compute the ear signals of a virtual listener with known head-related transfer functions from sampling either the sound pressure or the particle velocity (or both) of the simulated sound field. The available perceptual evaluation results of such methods are not comprehensive so that it is unclear what number and arrangement of sampling points is required for achieving perceptually transparent auralization, i.e.~for achieving an auralization that is perceptually indistinguishable from the ground truth. This article presents a perceptual evaluation of the most common binaural auralization methods with and without intermediate ambisonic representation of volumetrically sampled sound pressure or sound pressure and particle velocity sampled on spherical or cubical surfaces. Our results confirm that perceptually transparent auralization is possible if sound pressure and particle velocity are available at 289 sampling points on a spherical surface grid. Other grid geometries require considerably more points. All tested methods are available open source in the Chalmers Auralization Toolbox that accompanies this article.