Article
On the Relationship of Perceived Immersion to Acoustic Properties of Surround Sound Music Reproduction (en)
* Presenting author
Abstract:
Multichannel loudspeaker setups commonly known as “surround sound” systems promise to deliver an immersive music listening experience. In this context, immersion is to be understood as a high-level psychological construct based on a participant’s emotional response to a musical stimulus and is assumed to be related to the underlying physical sound field properties.In the main experimental study of the research project Richard Wagner 3.0 the phenomenon of immersion in music listening has been investigated in the psychological, physiological and acoustic domains. Several musical pieces in multiple versions for different loudspeaker reproduction formats have been used in a listening experiment with naive subjects. The various stimuli are based on different recording and production techniques such as microphone array recording, spatial mixing of multichannel recordings or manual upmixing from stereo.In this work, the musical stimuli used in the study are characterized with respect to their sound field properties at the listening position including loudness, spectral properties, spatial and binaural features. The perceived immersion ratings recorded in the study are analyzed in relation to these acoustic properties, taking the different production techniques into account. The roles of different sound field characteristics and their contributions to perceived immersion are discussed.