Subjective Expectation Adjustments of Early-to-Late Reverberant Energy Ratio and Reverberation Time to Match Visual Environmental Cues of a Musical Performance

The subject of auditory-visual integration has become increasingly important with the introduction of highresolution playback devices for on-screen object segregation. What effect does the visual location of an object have on a participant’s expectations of that object’s auditory stimulus? Several studies have looked at the phenomenon in recent years, but these studies rely on static images, speech signals, or photographs alone to represent the visual scene. Building on these studies, our aim is to propose a novel testing method using monochromatic compositing (blue-screen technique) to locate a musical performance recorded in a studio in a number of virtual acoustical environments being assessed by a subject. In this study, the participant is asked to match two distinct acoustical parameters, Early-to-Late Reverberant Energy Ratio and Reverberation Time, of two musical performances in five contrasting visual environments according to his or her expectations of how the room should sound given its visual appearance. This study reveals participant resiliency in the presence of forced auditoryvisual mismatch; participants are able to adjust the presented acoustic modeling algorithm in a statistically similar way despite randomized starting values for the monitored parameters. Subjective results of the experiment are presented along with objective measurements for verification.