Acoustics and Hearing

When one listens to music at home, one would like to have an acoustic impression close to that of being in the concert hall. Until recently this meant elaborate multi-channelled sound systems with 5 or more speakers. But head-related stereophony achieves the surround-sound effect in living rooms with only two loudspeakers. By virtue of their slight directivity as well as an electronic filter the limitations previously common to two-speaker systems can be overcome and this holds for any arbitrary two-channel recording. The book also investigates the question of how a wide and diffuse sound image can arise in concert halls and shows that the quality of concert halls decisively depends on diffuse sound images arising in the onset of reverberation. For this purpose a strong onset of reverberation is modified in an anechoic chamber by electroacoustic means. Acoustics and Hearing proposes ideas concerning signal processing in the auditory system that explain the measured results and the resultant sound effects pleasing to the audience.