Recognition of an auditory environment: Investigating room-induced influences on immersive experience

Four distinct multichannel playback rooms were compared in this study. In each room, we played three classical music pieces mixed for 22.2 and 2 channels, respectively, and generated corresponding binaural recordings. Fifteen trained listeners participated in a listening experiment where they compared four rooms on five salient attributes: perceived width, perceived depth, spatial clarity, impression being enveloped, and spectral balance of the sound field. A factor analysis shows that two factors accounted for about 70% of the total variance. The first factor is associated with spatial dimension of a sound field and the second factor with spectral and spatial integration (or blend) of sound components.