CONTENTS WHICH YIELD HIGH AUDITORY-PRESENCE IN SOUND REPRODUCTION

A psychoacoustical experiment was conducted to examine the basic characteristics of auditory presence as the first step to obtain a full understanding of the multi-modal sensation of presence. Twenty-three sounds were binaurally recorded using a dummy head and reproduced to four subjects by headphones. The experiment was carried out using Scheffe's paired comparison method modified by Ura using a scale of five categories. Analysis of variance revealed that the auditory presence as the main effect was highly significant. As a result of scaling, the sounds of moving sound sources were evaluated as having a higher presence than the sounds of stationary sound sources. As for the latter, sounds with larger sound images were rated as having a relatively higher presence. The effects other than the main effect and the interactions between them, however, were also significant. In the interactions, the individual differences for the main effect tended to be explained as the difference in weights of the subjects on the psychological factors involved in the auditory presence.