The occlusion effect occurs when the ear is completely or partially occluded, for example when wearing earphones or hearing aids. Sound transmitted through the body is amplified at lower frequencies, resulting in an altered perception of one’s own voice, often described as "hollow" or "talking into a barrel". This effect is one of the main […]

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. […]