Perceptual investigation into envelopment, spatial clarity, and engulfment in reproduced multi-channel audio

Composers of electroacoustic music have engaged with 3D sound since the first performances of these works in the 1950s. Currently, the majority of electroacostic compositions continue to be presented in 2D. Although human auditory perception is 3D, music composition has not adequately exploited the creative possibilities of this dimension. It is argued that ecologically valid perceptual experiments are required when attempting to formulate compositional techniques for electroacoustic music composition. Further, the paper presents a novel research method for the perceptual evaluation of 3D multi-channel electroacoustic music. The spatial attributes of envelopment, spatial clarity, and engulfment, are employed to evaluate composed multi-channel 3D sound executed within an ecologically valid concert hall environment. Results focus on the perceptual rating of the spatial attributes, envelopment and the proposed 3D unique attribute, engulfment. The results for Experiment 1 suggest that engulfment is a 3D unique spatial attribute and perceptual differs to envelopment in 3D spatial scenes.