The irrelevant sound effect (ISE) is a popular topic in cognitive psychology, referring to the phenomenon where hearing sounds unrelated to a memory task disrupts recall during task performance. Research on the ISE can deepen understanding of the human brain's information processing mechanisms, thereby making contributions to advancements in the medical field while also providing […]

It is broadly recognized that noise pollution is widespread, especially in urban areas, and can cause long-term psychological effects and health issues. Road traffic noise is a major contributor to noise pollution in residential areas and affects the well-being of a significant number of people. Auralization, the process of making acoustic environments virtually audible through […]

This research focuses on simulating road traffic soundscapes using auralization techniques. A structured workflow for urban traffic auralization is developed by integrating SUMO traffic flow data with acoustic simulation tools such as RAVEN and Pigeon. To generate plausible traffic simulations, a custom script is implemented to produce representative vehicle trajectories. Additionally, parameters such as crossfading […]

The RAVEN room acoustic software was benchmarked against measurements of the loudspeaker orchestra conducted by Pätynen et al. in the Gasteig concert hall, Munich. The specific source arrangement used in the study plays a crucial role, as it diversifies the direct and reflected sound paths, significantly altering the perception compared to a single omnidirectional room […]

With the increasing usage of heat pumps in residential areas, their noise emissions have become a growing concern. One potential solution is masking, where additional sounds modify the perception of unwanted noise. This study investigated the effects of different types of maskers (pink noise, high-pass filtered pink noise, and water sound) and masker locations on […]

This study investigates how tonality influences the perceived annoyance of heat pump noise. Heat pumps produce noise mainly from fans and compressors. These noises often contain prominent tonal components that can make them particularly disturbing. In this work, four fundamental heat pump noise samples were divided into three frequency bands, and their tonal features were […]

It is well known that children are more affected by poor acoustic conditions than adults. However, the concept of listening effort has been the focus of considerable more research in adults than in children, particularly in the context of assessing listening effort with multiple measures. This study employed three measures of listening effort: a word […]

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. […]

High-channel-count spatial audio systems, such as Wave Field Synthesis (WFS), often rely on specialized hardware to drive the speakers. This significantly increases the costs. Furthermore, commercial audio equipment can be challenging to integrate with free and open-source software. To provide an open alternative, this thesis describes the design, implementation, and evaluation of an Ethernet audio […]

Traffic noise pollution is responsible for major health issues. To predict the human traffic noise perception of urban soundscapes during the planning phase, a validated auralization tool is needed. The current approach by the IHTA is the auralization pipeline Pynamic, which is able to simulate heterogeneous sound paths containing both diffraction and reflection. This thesis […]

Humans often miss otherwise obvious unexpected events when they are focused on a demanding task. This can occur in the auditory as well as visual domain – inattentional deafness and blindness, respectively. These phenomena can pose a danger in everyday life, such as not noticing a child crossing the street while focusing on other aspects […]

Geometrical acoustics has been widely used to simulate sound propagation in various environments because it has a lower computational cost than wave-based numerical simulations. An acoustic radiosity model (Sparrowpy) with a tabulated BRDF extension, which discretises reflections into finite cones based on random incidence or bidirectional scattering coefficients, is compared to an alternative ARE-based implementation […]

The primary objective of this thesis was to model primary school classroom noises in acoustic virtual reality of the three activity-based acoustic situations (ABAS): silent work, group work, and classroom break. In a subsequent step, the objective was to evaluate how close these noises resemble real-life primary school classroom soundscapes. Currently, there is no freely […]

The occlusion effect (OE) describes the increased perception of body internal sound such as one’s own voice when the ear canal is blocked. This phenomenon often leads to discomfort with hearing aids or hearing protection devices. There are two common approaches for the assessment of the OE. The objective OE which is based on ear […]

Traffic noise in urban environments constitutes a significant health hazard, creating potential for proactive noise management and auralization as tool for modern urban planning. However, state-of-the-art raybased Geometrical Acoustics (GA) models utilized in current auralization pipelines struggle to predict the sound propagation across grounds featuring varying acoustic properties, known as Impedance Discontinuity (ID). Relying just […]

Traffic noise is an important public health issue and factor of annoyance. Auralization enables its perceptual evaluation in virtual environments. In outdoor sound propagation simulations, however, geometric modeling often focuses on large-scale features, while smaller roadside structures are neglected or simplified. For vehicle noise sources located close to the ground, roadside structures of similar height […]

Accurate determination of acoustic ground impedance is essential for predicting sound propagation over outdoor surfaces. However, the measurement process is affected by uncertainties arising from the experimental setup, particularly from variations in source and receiver positioning. The objective of this thesis is to investigate how geometric uncertainties propagate through impedance measurement procedures and influence the […]

Audiovisuelle Sprache verbessert im Allgemeinen, aber insbesondere unter ungünstigen Hörbedingungen, die Sprachverständlichkeit, indem sie ergänzende visuelle Informationen liefert. Es bleibt jedoch unklar, ob sich diese Wahrnehmungsvorteile auch in einer verbesserten Arbeitsgedächtnisleistung niederschlagen oder ob die Integration von auditiver und visueller Sprache zusätzliche kognitive Kosten mit sich bringt. Bisherige Studien konnten die potenziellen Integrationskosten nicht ermitteln, […]

Listening under challenging conditions can be effortful and requires considerable cognitive resources. This is particularly relevant for children, for whom speech understanding is integral for learning and development. The Framework for Understanding Effortful Listening (FUEL) suggests that invested listening effort does not increase indefinitely with task demands, as motivation is an important factor in determining […]