The Effect of Acoustic Incongruence on Immersion and Auditory Perception in Binaural Audio

This study investigated the influence of room-acoustic congruency in binaural audio reproduction on immersive experience and auditory perception in film watching. The convergent condition was created by binaurally synthesising 7.0.4 multichannel audio signals extracted from a film, Dune: Part One (2021), using multichannel binaural room impulse responses (BRIRs) captured in an ITU-R BS.1116-compliant critical listening room, which is where a listening test was conducted. The divergent condition was created using the BRIRs of an untreated living room. 34 subjects participated in the listening test, with one group of 17 subjects testing the convergent condition whilst the other 17 subjects tested the divergent condition. After watching an 8-minute-long excerpt from the film with the audio played on headphones, the subjects completed a 24-item film immersion questionnaire (Rigby et al. 2019) and an additional 14-item questionnaire on the auditory experience. The overall results suggest that room-acoustic divergence is not influencing the film-watching experience, but correlations between certain subscales can be observed.