LoRA: A Loudspeaker-Based Room Auralization System

In order to study basic human perception in reverberant environments, a novel loudspeaker-based room auralization (LoRA) system is proposed in this paper. The LoRA system efficiently combines modern room acoustic models with high-order Ambisonic auralization. An objective evaluation has been carried out demonstrating the applicability of the LoRA system. Room acoustic parameters (reverberation time, clarity, speech transmission index and inter-aural cross correlation coefficients) of room impulse responses were compared at the input and the simulated output of the LoRA system. Results show that the involved signal processing preserves the temporal, spectral and spatial properties of the room impulse response captured by these parameters. This flexible research platform will be useful for studying auditory processing and perception in normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners in fully controlled and realistic environments.