Research areas Binaural Hearing / Medizinische Akustik

This joint project of the Institute of Technical Acoustics in cooperation with the Institute of Psychology (Cognitive and Experimental Psychology) will study selective auditory attention using various binaural reproduction techniques.

The process of arbitrary switching of attention is of high practical interest, such as being interrupted in a talk on a train platform in order to follow the announcer. Usually experimental studies in the laboratory are carried out using dichotic presentation; however, the natural hearing sensation is binaural. In order to make valid studies a binaural reproduction method should be used.

From the perspective of technical acoustics, it is important to know how selective hearing differs under different presentation conditions. A simple test environment with a binaural presentation is, for example, a loudspeaker reproduction in an anechoic chamber. An acoustic scene with different speakers around the listeners head can be reproduced by different loudspeaker. This loudspeaker reproduction will be used as reference in a series of experiments. An important technical question is how the acoustic conditions of normal binaural hearing can be reproduced artificially using headphones so that they are suitable for psychoacoustic studies of auditory selective attention without sacrificing quality.