Auditory Room Identification in a Memory Task

How we perceive and remember room acoustics is of particular interest in the domain of spatial audio. For the creation of virtual or augmented acoustic environments, a room acoustic impression needs to be created which matches the expectations of certain room classes or a specific room. These expectations are based on the auditory memory of the acoustic room impression. In this paper, we present an exploratory study to evaluate the ability of listeners to remember specific rooms. The task of the listeners was to detect the reference room in a modified ABX double-blind stimulus test which featured a pre-defined playback order and a fixed time schedule. Furthermore, we explored distraction effects by employing additional non-acoustic interferences. The results show a significant decrease of the auditory memory capacity within ten seconds, which is more pronounced when the listeners were distracted. However, the results suggest that auditory memory depends on what auditory cues are available.