The importance of head movements during binaural synthesis

A listening experiment was done to investigate the effects head movements have on the localization of loudspeakers in a listening room. A short stimulus was presented through one of several loudspeakers, which the listener was required to identify. The listener either had to keep still during the presentation of sound or was allowed to move freely while seated on a chair. Sounds were presented either directly through the loudspeakers, or through headphones, in which case they were created by means of binaural synthesis. The results show that localization improves considerably when head movements are allowed. The improvement is very significant, which encourages the use of head tracking in binaural synthesis. Supported by STVF/FTP.