A triangulation method for determining the perceptual center of the head for auditory stimuli

Although sound source locations are traditionally expressed in a coordinate system with its origin at the midpoint of the listener's interaural axis, there is little evidence that listeners actually use this coordinate system to judge the relative locations of sounds. In this experiment, location pairs where nearby and distant sound sources appeared to be at the same angle in azimuth were used to triangulate the location of the perceptual center of the head. The results show that an auditory parallax effect generally shifts the perceptual center of the head several centimeters in front of the listener's interaural axis.