Hearing Of Music In Three Spatial Dimensions

All the objects of our perceptive world are distinct in time and space and have distinct properties, i.e., they appear at certain times, in certain positions, and are equipped with qualities specific to them. What is valid for all the percepts, consequently, also applies to what one can hear namely, what we shall call the auditory events in the following. People who listen to a speaker have, for example, an auditory event speaker which is perceptually present during a certain period of time, in a certain region in space, and posesses certain properties such as specific loudness, pitch, timbre, etc. In the framework of this essay our primary interest is the spatial distinctness of auditory percepts, in other words, the positions and spatial extensions of the auditory events. We want to explain how these positions and extensions depend on certain features of the sound signals which are received and processed by the human auditory system. These dependencies, i.e., the facts of spatial hearing, are of great practical importance for music, among other things in the following contexts.