Effect of Sound Spatialization on Responses to Overlapping Messages

The purpose of this research was to determine if a spatialized headphone display would improve users' recognition accuracy when listening to more than two overlapping messages. This type of task has numerous applications in a variety of different military settings, such as aviation communications and combat information centers. Two experiments were conducted in the Advanced Auditory Displays Laboratory at the Naval Postgraduate School. The first experiment was a pilot study which was designed to identify the factors that contributed to changes in response accuracy rates. The conclusion of this effort was a decision to use a chi-squared analysis and a multivariate logit regression, which could examine the influence of several factors in addition to spatialization. Results indicated that participants accurately identified 43% of the messages in the spatialized condition, but only 17% of the messages in the non-spatialized condition. Chi-squared tests indicated a dependent relationship between accuracy and spatialization tinder a variety of conditions. The logit regression model confirmed these conclusions and indicated that the chance of a completely correct response was improved by approximately 30% with the use of spatialization.Naval Postgraduate School Monterey CA is the author of 'Effect of Sound Spatialization on Responses to Overlapping Messages', published 2002 under ISBN 9781423509424 and ISBN 1423509420.