Bill Hartmann's contribution to understanding and modeling the perception of reflections in real rooms

In my early career, Bill Hartmann's exceptional four-paper JASA series “Sound Localization in Rooms” caught my eye when I became interested in modeling the precedence effect. The latter three papers and a subsequent one in 2010 were co-authored by Brad Rakerd. The series investigated the precedence effect in various rooms as a function of signal characteristics, bandwidth, and onset duration and provided a holistic view of a complex problem. As a student, I started to appreciate Bill's willingness to walk beside the beaten path of research, and I remember the lively discussions with the audience that helped me to learn to think more critically. Hartmann and Rakerd's research led to the formation of their “plausibility hypothesis,” stating that listeners can discount implausible cues. This hypothesis became a central point in my efforts to model the precedence effect, resulting in different attempts to model the effect based on onsets and ongoing signal components. These models include a modified Lindemann algorithm and two models based on multilayer auto/cross-correlation structures. The presentation focuses on how these and other models can be applied to the studies by Hartmann and Rakerd.