ABSTRACT
The empirical acoustic engineering literature has shown that listeners are sensitive to the sound reflecting properties of spaces so as to judge the acoustic quality and general dimensions of the space. There is also speculation on the perceptual skills listeners use to apprehend properties of spaces. Still, there is no research testing whether listeners can simply recognize different types of rooms based on reflected structure. The experiment examined this question by asking listeners to identify four different rooms based on hearing how the rooms structured (reflected; reverberated) emitted sounds. Five different sound sources were binaurally recorded in four different acoustic spaces. The sources ranged from human speech to white noise bursts. Overall, listeners were outstanding at the task, displaying mean room identification accuracy of 78% and means ranging from 50-93% correct across the different sounds. These results suggest that listeners can recognize rooms by based on how the rooms structure emitted sounds.
