Improvement of 3D Sound Using Psychoacoustic Characteristics

The Head Related Transfer Function (HRTF) means a process related to acoustic transmission from 3d space to the listener's ear. In other words, it contains the information that human can perceive locations of sound sources. So, we make virtual 3d sound using HRTF, despite it doesn't actually exist. But, it can deteriorate some three-dimensional effect by the confusion between front and back directions due to the non-individual HRTF depending on each listener. In this paper, we proposed the new algorithm to reduce the confusion of sound image localization using human's acoustic characteristics. The frequency spectrum and global masking threshold of 3d sounds using HRTF are used to calculate the psychoacoustical differences among each directions. And perceptible cues in each critical band are boosted to create effective 3d sound. As a result, we can make the improved 3d sound, and the performances are much better than conventional methods.