Evaluation of dynamic binaural reproduction system for live transmitted xylophone recording

For a special teaching application of the telepresence research project BEAMING, a scenario of a remote teacher (the Visitor) teaching a local student to play a xylophone through an embodiment is defined.
In order to achieve this, a system is required to record, transmit and render the sound of the xylophone to the teacher in a dynamic scene. In an implementation of such a system, the xylophone is recorded using a mono recording technique. The signal is then processed to spread out the sound of the distributed sound source as multiple point sources in the virtual scene experienced by the Visitor.
Finally head tracking allows for a dynamic binaural rendering of the xylophone sound. The goal of this paper is to evaluate the realism of this virtual (auditory) representation of a real xylophone. A listening test is designed to compare characteristics of a real physical xylophone in front of the listener with a rendering using the described system.
The evaluation is done with a basis in methods previously used for evaluating the subjective sensation of presence in virtual reality systems, mainly based on questionnaires.