Abstract:
This work deals with the question of how the spatial distribution of sound sources affects psychoacoustic quantities and thus the sound quality. Using listening tests, we investigated how three of the most important psychoacoustic quantities, namely sharpness, roughness and tonal audibility, behave in different spatial characteristics of sound fields. If two sound sources are located near each other or if sounds are presented diotically, the human auditory system will per-ceive the sum signal. Therefore, the annoyance of the scene is caused by the sum signal. If these two sound sources are spa-tially separated, a different level of annoyance might be expected depending on the prominent influence of one of these sources. However, listening tests have proved that even in the latter case the total annoyance results from the sum signal on average. Regarding the annoyance judgement of a sound scene, it does not make a significant difference whether the sound sources are located at one position or whether they are spatially distributed.