1  Introduction to spatial audio

1.1  The spatial dimension in natural sound

Everyday life is full of three-dimensional sound experiences. The ability of humans to make sense of their environments and to interact with them depends strongly on spatial awareness and hearing plays a major part in this process. Natural sounds are perceived in terms of their location and, possibly less consciously, their size (most people rely more strongly on their visual sense for this information). Typically natural sound environments contain cues in all three dimensions (width, height, depth) and one is used to experiencing sounds coming from all around, with no one direction having particular precedence over any other. Because listeners don’t have eyes in the ...

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