Event:

Owen Brimijoin (MRC Hearing Institute, Glasgow, UK)

He will present the following:

"Auditory/Vestibular Interaction: The influence of self-generated motion on spatial auditory perception"

Every time we turn our heads the acoustic world rotates around us, generating changes in binaural and spectral cues. Furthermore, we are rarely perfectly still: our heads continually rotate and the auditory world moves in opposition. Experimental investigation into the processing of auditory motion has been largely restricted to the study of moving sound sources (e.g., Grantham, 1997). This type of auditory motion (‘world motion’) is less common than the motion that is elicited by one’s own movements (‘self motion’). When we turn our heads, sound sources do not appear to spin in the opposite direction, arguing that listeners incorporate information on self motion into judgments of dynamic acoustic space. Our research as well as the research of others suggests that self motion contributes to our sound localization accuracy, how well sounds are externalized, front versus back localization, and even speech intelligibility in spatially complex background noises. This talk will follow the progress of our recent work combining high speed motion tracking and real-time spatial audio processing to examine the extent to which self motion cues are actually used by listeners.