Perceptually Transparent Binaural Auralization of Simulated Sound Fields

Artikel i vetenskaplig tidskrift, 2026

Contrary to geometric acoustics-based simulations where the spatial information is available in a tangible form, it is not straightforward to auralize wave-based simulations. A variety of methods have been proposed that compute the ear signals of a virtual listener with known head-related transfer functions from sampling either the sound pressure or the particle velocity (or both) of the simulated sound field. This article summarizes the most common binaural auralization methods with and without intermediate ambisonic representation of volumetrically sampled sound pressure or sound pressure and particle velocity sampled on spherical or cubical surfaces and presents a perceptual validation thereof. A triangular test (N = 19) confirmed that all evaluated grids resulted in a perceptually transparent auralization for the three tested sound incidence angles under reverberant conditions. Under anechoic conditions, only the high-density spherical and cubical surface grids lead to transparent auralization. All tested methods are available open source in the Chalmers Auralization Toolbox that accompanies this article.