The complexity of populated real-life environments is hard to recreate in laboratory listening experiments. Using Virtual Reality (VR), this complexity can be simulated with close-to-real-life environments, while maintaining high controllability and reproducibility. However, there is a lack of guidelines which aspects of reality have to be represented in the virtual environments to ensure ecological validity. Studies may only focus on auditory representation of sound sources, use unrealistic or static background noise, or disregard the use of room acoustic simulation for simplicity.

The central objective of this study was to develop an audiovisual VR framework that provides a closer-to-real-life environment than many other VR experiments used to this day, using realistic background noise represented visually by embodied agents. With this framework, the influence of room acoustics on listening effort and memory in an open-plan office environment was investigated by comparing three acoustic conditions: free-field acoustics, an „out-of-the-box“ reconstruction of an open-plan office, and an acoustically treated version of that model. The mid-frequency reverberation times were T30 = 0.0 s, 1.0 s and 0.5 s respectively.

Listening effort was quantified by testing 30 participants in a dual-task paradigm, during which participants performed a primary heard text recall task and a secondary vibrotactile pattern recognition task. Results strongly indicate lower listening effort in the free-field condition compared to both room acoustic simulations. No significant differences between the two room acoustic simulations were found. It is concluded that findings obtained from studies using free-field acoustics differ from more ecologically valid scenarios considering room acoustics.

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