Statistical analysis of binaural room impulse responses

Abstract

In previous work of the authors, the spectral magnitude of room transfer functions (RTFs) was analyzed using histograms and statistical quantities (moments), such as the kurtosis and skewness. In this work, the above analysis is extended to binaural room impulse responses (BRIRs) and the dependence of the statistical measures on the room acoustical properties, such as the reverberation time, the room size and the source receiver distance is discussed. Emphasis is given on the binaural measure of the magnitude squared coherence (MSC) which is considered to be an important cue for binaural hearing related to perceptual aspects such as the source width, the envelopment and the spaciousness. After a brief overview of the existing MSC models, a perceptually-motivated MSC implementation is examined, based on a gammatone filterbank. MSC results for various rooms and source-receiver positions are presented and related to the existing MSC models.