Combining binaural psychoacoustic characteristics for emotional evaluations of acoustic environments

Binaural perception has been acknowledged as a crucial aspect in evaluating acoustic environments as humans perceive acoustic environments through binaural hearing, which allows the perception of spatial characteristics in addition to spectral and temporal characteristics. While various objective metrics, such as psychoacoustic parameters, have been proposed to correlate with the subjective emotional evaluations of acoustic environments, most of these metrics do not reflect binaural perception. There is a lack of research on how to combine the two psychoacoustic characteristics calculated separately for each ear to correlate with subjective emotions. This study, based on a lab-based listening experiment, compares a number of existing and newly proposed methods of combining binaural psychoacoustic characteristics to assess their impacts on subjective emotional ratings of acoustic environments. Through the correlation analysis of the combined parameters and subjective ratings, the results show that subjective emotions mostly depend on the higher channel or statistics of two channels for most psychoacoustic parameters, especially Loudness, Fluctuation, and Tonality that have the greatest impacts on subjective emotions.