Talk to me: The Influence of Audio Quality on the Perception of Social Presence

In this paper, we compare the impact of monophonic, stereophonic, and binaural human speech recordings in terms of their ability to induce the feeling of presence and influence the understanding of the emotional state the speakers were in. These factors are generally important in entertainment applications, for example when conversing with a non-player character or in mediated synchronous human-to-human communication. Our results show a significant advantage of binaural over mono and stereo sound for inducing the sense of being present in an (virtual) environment. Furthermore, we found that listening to a stereophonic recording of a conversation leads to a significantly stronger understanding of the emotional state of speakers than listening to a mono or binaural recording.