Binaural Loudness for Artificial-Head Measurements in Directional Sound Fields

The effect of the sound incidence angle on loudness was investigated for fifteen listeners who matched the loudness of sounds coming from five different incidence angles in the horizontal plane to that of the same sound with frontal incidence. The stimuli were presented via binaural synthesis by using head-related transfer functions measured for an artificial head. The results, which exhibited marked individual differences, show that loudness depends on the direction from which a sound reaches the listener. The average results suggest a relatively simple rule for combining the two signals at the ears of an artificial head for binaural loudness predictions.