仮想環境を利用した音源距離定位

抄録

In this paper, attention is focused on the quantitative understanding of the role of sound intensity which is considered to be a very important cue of the sound localization with distance. Experiments were conducted by using virtual environment to clarify the relation between sound intensity and apparent distance from the sound source. The results are the followings:
(1) Replacing the experiments by M. B. Gardner to the virtual environment, the experimental results obtained on virtual environment were equal to those of real world. This fact ensures that the virtual environment can give the same results as those from real environment. The experimental condition of no other cues except sound intensity confirms the conclusion by M. B. Gardner that the sound intensity is a very important cue of apparent distance from the sound source.
(2) The relation between sound intensity and apparent source distance can be expressed as the form of exponential function. Namely, it becomes a straight line in logarithmic graph.
(3) The coefficient of the proportion of the straight line in logarithmic graph is restricted by both of the range of sound source distance and the range of sound intensity. The coefficients without any restriction are larger than the results obtained by M. B. Gardner.
(4) The results obtained from the experiments using method of adjustment was equal to those obtained from the experiments using forced-choice method with ranges wide enough. These results show the coefficients obtained are independent from any experimental conditions.
The obtained results above will be quite useful to design and evaluate the system using acoustic display.