Auditory Precedence Effect

The Effects of Room Acoustics on Auditory Spatial Cues The signals reaching the listener’s ears directly from a sound source convey information about the source’s location (Blauert 1997; Schnupp et al. 2010). However, in ordinary settings, soon after the direct sound reaches the listener, reflected sound arrives from random directions, coming off of walls, floors, and other reflective surfaces. This reflected sound energy adds acoustically to the direct sound before entering each ear, changing the total signal reaching the ear (e.g., see Allen and Berkley 1979). The content of this reflected sound energy depends on the geometry of the listening space, the positions of objects in the space, and the location and orientation of the listener. Moreover, the reflected sound energy differs at the left and right ears. As a result, this latearriving sound distorts the spatial information conveyed by the direct sound, degrading the spatial cues in the total signal. As a result, the acoustic location information in the signals a listener hears in everyday settings is less reliable after an initial “clean glimpse” of the direct sound that happens at sound onset, before the reflected energy arrives.