Directional loudness and binaural summation for wideband and reverberant sounds.

In an earlier investigation [Sivonen and Ellermeier, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 119, 2965-2980 (2006)], the effect of sound incidence angle on loudness was investigated for anechoic, narrowband sounds. In the present follow-up investigation, the effect of incidence angle on loudness was investigated using wideband sounds under anechoic conditions and narrowband sounds under reverberant conditions. Five listeners matched the loudness of a sound coming from five incidence angles in the horizontal plane to that of the same sound with frontal incidence. These directional loudness matches were obtained with an adaptive, two-alternative, two-interval, forced-choice procedure. The stimuli were presented to the listeners via individual binaural synthesis. The results show that loudness depends on sound incidence angle in both experiments. The wideband and reverberant sounds, however, yielded significantly smaller directional effects than had been obtained for the same listeners when anechoic, narrowband sounds were used. When modeling the binaural summation underlying the loudness matches, a power summation of the at-ear signals yielded good predictions for all types of stimuli investigated.