An Investigation of Early Reflection’s Effect on Front-Back Localization in Spatial Audio

In a natural sonic environment a listener is accustomed to hearing reflections and reverberation. It is conceived that early reflections could reduce front-back confusion in synthetic 3-D audio. This paper describes an experiment to determine whether or not simulated reflections can reduce front-back confusion for audio presented with nonindividualized HRTFs via headphones. Although the simple addition of a single-order reflection is not shown to eliminate all front-back confusions, some cases of lateral reflections from a side boundary can be shown to both assist and inhibit localization ability depending on the relationship of the source, observer and reflective boundary.