Thank you.
Do you think spectral cues and the ratio between direct and reflected sound are also positional cues?
If yes, which hints they provide to our brains and what positional conclusion our brains derive from them?
In other words, how do we perceive elevation and distance of one given speaker?
I believe the brain will make use of anything following patterns. we're the fabulous pattern machines. but for obvious reasons, we'll give priorities to some information. as long as the eyes are open, the rest takes a step back, always. when we close our eyes, hearing will give priority to survival stuff. general direction of the sound source works well enough with ILD, ITD not to require more to make a judgement call about the position, so I'm guessing if something else agrees it might be integrated, but if it conflicts with ILT ITD, I would expect the brain to trust ILD+ ITD.
for room reflections, we can most certainly identify and work with them. but I suspect there are different "modes" for the brain, although that's only an educated guess as I really don't know enough. but here is my reasoning:
we know that we can get a relative idea about the size of a room from reverb and stuff, now very precise, but if we know it's box shaped and not treated, we can guess something. and in the dark, we can sometimes guess if a wall is close or not depending on other sounds or even how our own voice comes back to us(but better move slow ^_^). we're not good at this but some information seems to be available anyway. so to some level it seems obvious we can make some use of other cues. why I think we have different "modes", is because of how under normal circumstances the brain clearly tries to remove the room. after a few minutes, we're getting used to reverb or specific room signature. I'm guessing it's one of those constant recalibration we apply all year long. the change from the room is something new, but as soon as it's stable and doesn't seem to wish to kill us(or something ^_^), the brain starts attenuating it so that it can focus on ... IDK, I imagine survival stuff and better identifying the cues that matter more? just like we get used to tainted googles pretty fast. maybe the brain believes it's too much of a distraction? in any case, to be able to push all that information like reverb and signature to the side, the brain must be able to identify it pretty well. so who knows what we can really do with all we perceive? I don't ^_^.
it's meant to be used with headphones. Processing the multichannel signal with your HRTF and sending it to two real speakers would be pointless.
