Course materials for UCL module COMP0160
As part of this lab you will act as a test subject in some simple auditory psychophysics experiments, which run in your web browser. You will need to use headphones. Please run the calibration test first and adjust your headphone volume to a safe and comfortable level.
Privacy note: You will be given the opportunity to download your results in CSV format. Your data is not otherwise stored or used in any way except for local presentation to you.
As in week 3, not all of these are strictly experiments — some are probably better thought of as demonstrations.
In between experiments, we’ll probably have a look* at some famous auditory illusions and effects.
* To use an inappropriate verb. Recall the ubiquity of visual language discussed last week!
As Ifat discussed on Monday, the brain infers a lot of spatial information from the patterns of sound detection at each ear. Binaural techniques exploit this ability to produce a highly spatialised audio experience by delivering different sounds to each ear, typically via headphones.
Binaural responses vary quite a bit between individuals, but personalisation is difficult or expensive, so widely available binaural methods tend to use generic head models. Nevertheless, they can still be very effective.
An awful lot of contemporary binaural material is pretty unimaginative, on a par with cinema in the 1890s — still caught up in the novelty of capturing this stuff at all. There’s a focus on ambient soundscapes and travelogues, plus a strong sideline in the weirdly popular niche of ASMR. But there have also been more creative applications of the technology, such as: