Binaural perceptual weighting of reverberation level in normal hearing listeners

In general, perceived reverberation strength is related to physical reverberation level present at the two ears; however, this relation depends on listening condition. Pervious work using virtual auditory space techniques has demonstrated that when physical reverberation is reduced in one ear while leaving the other ear unchanged, listeners do not report a change in reverberation strength. Reducing physical reverberation equally in both ears under binaural listening or in the signal ear under monaural listening elicits a decrease in perceived reverberation strength. To better understand the relation between physical and perceived reverberation in different listening conditions, a perceptual weighting experiment was performed. Listeners reported perceived reverberation strength in a test stimulus using a magnitude estimate paradigm relative to a standard while listening over headphones. Test stimuli were generated by jittering reverberation level independently in the two channels of a binaural room impulse response (BRIR) before convolution with a speech token. BRIRs with reverberation levels of -12, -6, and 0 dB at each ear relative to the standard were tested. Results of a perceptual weighting analysis suggest that listeners use different weighting strategies in different listening conditions, and are generally consistent with a “better ear” hypothesis for reverberation listening.