Effective Use of Psychoacoustics in Motion-Tracked Binaural Audio

Binaural sound capture and reproduction can produce sound of remarkable quality and realism over headphones. It also suffers from shortcomings that have hindered its widespread usage. Most notably, it does not eliminate the in-head localization that is also experienced with stereo recordings. Motion-tracking that restores the dynamic cues caused by normal movements of the head is necessary to externalize binaural sounds, but its computational requirements may be heavy. We have developed practical methods that realize motion-tracked binaural sound (MTB) both in capture and reproduction. In this paper, we review briefly the research on the effect of head motion on the perception of spatial sound, describe MTB and its variants, compare it to HTRF-based rendering, and discuss our experience with binaural motion tracked sound.