UC Santa Barbara

The use of space in music is a complex issue which involves several different, yet interrelated factors. The technical means of performance, the sonic material, and the overall musical aesthetic should all work together to produce a truly immersive experience and one which the listener can comprehend the spatial impression as independent and yet musically significant. Performances of spatial music typically involve a distributed audience and often take place in an acoustically reverberant space. This situation is quite different from the case of a single listener at home, or the composer in the studio or in a virtual reality setting with head mounted displays. As a result, spatial strategies which are effective in one context may not be transferable to another context. This thesis attempts to study the psychoacoustic factors of various music spatialization strategies in different contexts and in that process attempts to answer the questions, what psychoacoustic factors affect listening to music in non-virtual listening contexts and how could they transform when listening in a virtual listening context?How do these psychoacoustic factors work? This question is answered through three psychoacoustic studies. The first one on Sound Source Distance, the second and third are comparative studies of music spatialization algorithms with different music genres – a loudspeaker study and a binaural analysis study. The last part of the thesis is to build a prototype of a virtual concert hall that uses some of the learnings of the aforementioned studies.