Acoustic scenes created in virtual reality with life-like realism and features can be used to address important questions on auditory perception beyond the scope of the simplified stimuli and conditions of classical psychoacoustic laboratory tests.

We will develop a suite of ecologically relevant scenes with multiple stationary, moving and appearing sound sources and reverberation, verify their artefact-free auralization, develop psychophysical approaches for a variety of hearing tasks in such scenes, and provide scene documentation and baseline performance. We will advance psychophysical test methods towards novel interactive approaches based on automated, continuous performance analysis with observational techniques in audiovisual scenes.