Reverberation for Ambient Data Communication

We propose an ambient communication system that modulates the reverberance applied to music with a single variable in order to communicate non-musical information to the listener. In order to assess the effectiveness of such a system, psychoacoustic tests of four subjects’ ability to discriminate changes in reverberant decay time (RDT) were conducted. Results indicate that human listeners are able to accurately detect changes in RDT from a reference value of two, five, and ten seconds when the RDT increases by more than 60% or decreases by more than 30%. The rather large change in RDT required for accurate perception limits the dynamic range of the information that can be communicated when the variable is used to linearly change the RDT.