Project example: Creation of realistic conditions in hearing research
"I can't understand you! It's so loud in here" - a typical statement of a person in a fully occupied restaurant, during an event, or in many other everyday situations. The ability to hear a single source from different useful and interfering signals, which is necessary here, goes back to binaural hearing (two-eared hearing). However, basic experiments on binaural hearing have usually been carried out in the laboratory using very simple methods.
To improve this, both the acoustic virtual reality for the generation of the acoustic scene and the natural reproduction of the acoustic stimuli are required as tools. The trend in the binaural technique is increasingly towards mapping situations in which both the noise sources and the test persons can move, taking their individual hearing characteristics into account. With help of such scenes numerous experiments can be carried out, which lead to a better understanding of the processing in the auditory system. Areas of application range from basic hearing research to neurosciences.
More information can be found on the website of the Institute of Technical Acoustics.