Janina Fels

RWTH Aachen University · Institute for Hearing Technology and Acoustics

Major criteria for a successful binaural reproduction are not only a suitable localization performance, but also the authenticity and plausibility of the presented scene. It is therefore interesting to examine whether the binaural reproduction can be perceptually distinguished from a real source. The aim of the presented investigation is to compare...

Theory and implementation of acoustic virtual reality have matured and become a powerful tool for the simulation of entirely controllable virtual acoustic environments. Such virtual acoustic environments are relevant for various types of auditory experiments on subjects with normal hearing, facilitating flexible virtual scene generation and manipul...

The comparison of head-related transfer functions (HRTFs), e.g., for validating different acquisition methods, requires a meaningful way of quantifying HRTF differences – a problem to which literature offers no standardized approach. This impedes the comparability and interpretability of studies. The present work therefore addresses the lack of pro...

Head-related transfer functions (HRTFs) play a significant role in modern acoustic experiment designs in the auralization of 3-dimensional virtual acoustic environments. This technique enables us to create close to real-life situations including room-acoustic effects, background noise and multiple sources in a controlled laboratory environment. Whi...

The KEMAR Head and Torso Simulator is one of the most commonly used artificial head and torso measurement systems and its head-related transfer function (HRTF) is often used in 3D-audio applications.As part of this publication, an HRTF measurement performed in a hemi-anechoic chamber as well as a high resolution 3D-model of the used manikin is prov...

Building and room acoustics are relatively modern architectural and engineering disciplines, but acoustics have been a concern in buildings since ancient times, such as in Greek and Roman theatres. Today, we spend 80–90% of our time indoors, where sound significantly impacts our communication and actions, making it essential to consider acoustic as...

Virtual reality (VR) environments are frequently used in auditory and cognitive research to imitate real-life scenarios, presumably enhancing state-of-the-art approaches with traditional computer screens. However, the effects of different display technologies on audiovisual processing remain underexplored. This study investigated how VR displayed w...

It is well known that hearing in noisy situations is more challenging than in quiet environments. This holds true for adults and especially for children. This study employed a child-appropriate dual-task paradigm to investigate listening effort in children aged six to ten years and young adults. The primary task involved word recognition, while the...

An increasing number of heat pumps have recently been installed to replace conventional heating systems to provide more environmentally friendly and energy-efficient indoor heating. Most commonly, air-to-water heat pumps are chosen. However, the sounds of their fan and compressor can lead to noise complaints and can reach the limit of noise emissio...

Simulation and auralization of urban traffic noise can help city planners and residents to improve existing urban areas or plan new attractive living spaces while enabling discussions about shared auditory experiences, regardless of expertise. Evaluating street noise in the context of urban areas requires careful consideration of their urban surrou...

Listening to conversing talkers in quiet environments and remembering the content is a common activity. However, research on the cognitive demands involved is limited. This study investigates the relevance of individuals’ cognitive functions for listeners’ memory of two-talker conversations and their listening effort in quiet listening settings. A...

This technical report contains detailed information about anechoic recordings from an air-to-water heat pump system in different operating states. Based on these recordings, a total of 28 stimuli were selected and processed from three different operating states: high-power heating, maximum capacity, and defrost. Additionally, the measurement of the...

Electric drones serve diverse functions, including delivery and surveillance. Nonetheless, they encounter significant challenges due to their annoying noise emissions. To address this issue, a sound database was created from experiments conducted in a hover-test-bench and real flights operated indoors. These experiments involved a wide range of par...

Simulation and auralization of urban traffic noise can help city planners and residents to improve existing urban areas or plan new attractive living spaces while enabling discussions about shared auditory experiences, regardless of expertise. Evaluating street noise in the context of urban areas requires careful consideration of their urban surrou...

The audio-visual Auditory Selective Attention VR - Noise project serves to investigate the impact of realistic noise on auditory selective attention switch in a close-to-real-life classroom setting. This dataset consists of a Unity project and Matlab code used to collect data on the voluntary switching of auditory selective attention in a virtual r...

Many lecturers develop voice problems, such as hoarseness. Nevertheless, research on how voice quality influences listeners’ perception, comprehension, and retention of spoken language is limited to a small number of audio-only experiments. We aimed to address this gap by using audio-visual virtual reality (VR) to investigate the impact of a lectur...

Audiovisual cross-modal correspondences refer to the brain's inherent ability to subconsciously and consistently connect auditory and visual information. Such correspondences reveal the mechanisms through which our brain integrates and makes sense of multisensory information. Earlier studies have shown that congruent cross-modally associated stim...

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a significant increase in working from home worldwide, making the work-from-home (WFH) setting a crucial context for studying the influence of indoor environmental quality (IEQ) on workers’ well-being and productivity. A narrative and visual synthesis of 41 research articles on IEQ in WFH settings was conducted to i...

It is increasingly harder to distinguish between auditory and visual influences on perception and cognition in listening experiments that use virtual reality. Changing the context of an auditory selective attention task from a lab environment to a virtual classroom scenario, we found indications for enhanced attention in the virtual environment in...

Zur Verbesserung der Luftqualität in Innenräumen werden in immer mehr Gebäuden Lüftungsgeräte eingebaut, welche eine kontinuierliche Frischluftzufuhr sicherstellen. Jedoch entsteht der unerwünschte Nebeneffekt von Luftüngsgeräuschen. Werden die Systeme bei niedrigen Volumenströmen betrieben, kann dies schon zu Schallleistungspegeln knapp über typis...

In recent years, there has been a growing effort to create experiments that mimic real-life situations, aiming to improve the ecological validity of research. From an acoustic point of view, one step in this direction is to use binaural reproduction to create a lifelike acoustic environment for participants. Previous work found that white noise inf...

In the project ECoClass-VR we successively increase the realism of an existing test paradigm referred to as ”audio- visual scene analysis” by Ahrens et al. Here, subjects listen to stories told by a set of talkers surrounding them. The listeners are asked to identify the content of the talkers and their specific locations, as measures of cognitive...

Urban noise pollution, particularly from road traffic, poses a significant challenge in modern cities. Simulation techniques have become crucial for designing and optimizing attractive, healthy living spaces. When it comes to more detailed analyses than required in standard noise mapping techniques, auralization, i.e. the creation of sounds in virt...

Children face various communication situations in their daily school life, e.g., frontal-teaching, group work and silent work. During all these school activities noise is omnipresent in class. It has already been found that noise in schools affects children’s learning during speech perception and influences their health. In these noisy conditions,...

Virtuelle Akustik kann Personen auditiv in eine andere Umgebung versetzen, virtuelle Elemente zur realen Umgebung hinzufügen oder diese für den/die Nutzer:in modifiziert erscheinen lassen. Inzwischen erzielt die Virtuelle Akustik dabei perzeptiv so überzeugende Ergebnisse, dass sie sowohl als Werkzeug in der Forschung als auch als Technologie in ko...

A teacher’s poor voice quality may increase listening effort in pupils, but it is unclear whether this effect persists in adult listeners. Thus, the goal of this study is to examine the impact of vocal hoarseness on university students' listening effort in a virtual seminar room. An audio-visual immersive virtual reality environment is utilized to...

Urban noise pollution, particularly from road traffic, poses a significant challenge in modern cities. Simulation techniques have emerged as valuable tools for understanding and managing noise. However, to ensure the accuracy and realism of traffic noise simulations, it is crucial to develop model-based descriptions of vehicle sources and sound pro...

In the past years, more and more effort has been made to bring the reality in the lab to investigate cognitive performance in a close-to real life manner and, thus, increase the validity of current research. A first step towards being ecologically valid is using a dynamic binaural reproduction, which offers an accurate representation and allows the...

In classrooms, children are often challenged by competing speech, loud background noises, or unfavorable room acoustics when listening to their educators. These challenging listening situations require more cognitive, attentional, and perceptual processing resources to understand speech, i.e., higher listening effort. This study introduces a dual-t...

The software Virtual Acoustics (VA) is an open-source auralization framework developed at the Institute for Hearing Technology and Acoustics, RWTH Aachen University, Germany. Using physics-based models for source emission and sound propagation, it allows plausible rendering of virtual scenes based on purely synthetic data. Its modular design provid...

Acoustic measurements conducted using head and torso simulators (HATS) are considered to represent natural human hearing more realistically in comparison to measurements conducted using omnidirectional microphones. Traditionally, HATS are designed and built with respect to the anthropometric data of adults. Correspondingly, evaluation methods and m...

Hearing in noisy situations is known to be more effortful than in quiet environments for adults and especially for children. Listening effort is defined as the cognitive, attentional, and perceptual processing resources necessary to understand and process speech. This study developed a child-appropriate dual-task paradigm considering aurally accura...

The investigation of listening comprehension in auditory and visually complex classroom settings is a promising method to evaluate children's cognitive performance in a realistic setting. Many studies were able to show that children are more susceptible to noise than adults. However, it has recently been suggested that established monaural listenin...

Describing common noise patterns caused by different activities and situations in educational buildings is a complex topic. First categorizations of activities have been developed for primary schools addressing children starting from the age of six. They were based on the teacher-to-children-communication pathways or the teaching activity, such as...

The irrelevant sound effect (ISE) characterizes short-term memory performance impairment during irrelevant sounds relative to quiet. Irrelevant sound presentation in most laboratory-based ISE studies has been rather limited to represent complex scenarios including open-plan offices (OPOs) and not many studies have considered serial recall of heard...

In ECoClass-VR we investigate the suitability of audiovisual virtual environments to assess the influence of complex visual and acoustic scenes on cognitive performance in classroom-type scenarios. Until now, most studies have investigated rather simple acoustic and visual representations, which do not reflect the reality of school children. To imp...

The irrelevant sound effect (ISE) characterizes short-term memory performance impairment during irrelevant sounds relative to quiet. Irrelevant sound presentation in most ISE studies has been rather limited to represent complex scenarios including open-plan offices (OPOs) and not many studies have considered serial recall of heard information. This...

This work aims at deriving a minimum required resolution for optimization of head-related transfer functions (HRTFs). It builds on existing metrics, used to numerically evaluate HRTF differences, as well as on a model estimating just noticeable differences (JNDs) for unilateral variation of HRTFs. Integrating this model, as well as descriptors for...

Auditory selective attention is a valuable tool to orient oneself in highly complex acoustic scenes, including spatially distributed target speakers and background noises. Among others, it includes processes of intentional attention control in spatial situations and suppression of irrelevant incoming information. This contribution provides an overv...

This work proposes a parametric model for just noticeable differences of unilateral differences in head-related transfer functions (HRTFs). For seven generic magnitude-based distance metrics, common trends in their response to inter-individual and intra-individual HRTF differences are analyzed, identifying metric subgroups with pseudo-orthogonal be...

Open-plan offices (OPOs) have been around for more than half a century now, chronicling the vicissitudes of workplace topography amongst other factors. This paper addresses one such factor - the sound environment in occupied OPOs in relation to several objective workplace parameters, using measurements in contemporary OPOs and comparisons with stud...

Seit den letzten Jahren nimmt die Wärmepumpe bei der Wärmeversorgung von Gebäuden eine immer größer werdende Rolle ein. Die akustischen Eigenschaften von Luft-Wasser-Wärmepumpen haben dabei einen entscheidenden Einfluss auf die Akzeptanz bei den Endnutzern und in der Gesellschaft. Nicht nur der Ventilator und der Verdichter tragen zur Geräuschentwi...

In vielen üblich ausgestatteten Klassenräumen werden die normierten Vorgaben zu Nachhallzeiten überschritten, was die Sprachverständlichkeit nachteilig beeinflusst und die negativen Effekte der Lärmwirkung weiter verstärkt. Insbesondere die Konzentrations- und Merkfähigkeit sowie das Textverständnis von Schülerinnen und Schülern, aber auch von Lehr...

Since virtual reality (VR) offers great opportunities to investigate auditory phenomena in more close to real-life scenarios, it is important to translate and extend established paradigms to consider the new technology. One major novelty in VR as opposed to classical laboratory conditions is the spatial audio setup and the added immersive visual co...

The predictive coding framework of neuronal processing hypothesizes that the layers in the processing hierarchy propagate prediction errors rather than abstractions of sensory input. In the auditory system a detuned tone in the sequence of a well-known melody would represent a source of such a prediction error. Instead of the tone being processed a...

During auditory development, children are confronted with the challenge of orienting themselves in complex acoustic situations. For this, they need to focus on a relevant target sound while ignoring simultaneous distracting sounds in a multi-layered acoustic environment, which is known as auditory selective attention. In everyday communication situ...

People in industrialised countries spend most of their days indoors and are often exposed to ventilation sounds. Since ventilation systems are not only used in industry but also increasingly in residential buildings, it is important to study its sound radiation and the consequences for our well-being. This research project aims to identify if geome...

This dataset contains speech and noise material for a paradigm to investigate intentional switching of auditory selective attention in children. Two-syllable animal names were recorded from a male child and a female adult speaker. The spoken words were cut to the same length and adjusted to the same loudness to fulfill the requirements of a synchro...

The ability to focus ones attention in different acoustical environments has been thoroughly investigated in the past. However, recent technological advancements have made it possible to perform laboratory experiments in a more realistic manner. In order to investigate close-to-real-life scenarios, a classroom was modeled in virtual reality (VR) an...

Most studies investigating the effects of environmental noise on children’s cognitive performance examine the impact of monaural noise (i.e., same signal to both ears), oversimplifying multiple aspects of binaural hearing (i.e., adequately reproducing interaural differences and spatial information). In the current study, the effects of a realistic...

The audio-visual Auditory Selective Attention VR Proof of Concept project serves to investigate the auditory selective attention switch in a close-to-real-life classroom setting. This dataset consists of a Unity project and Matlab code used to collect data on the voluntary switching of auditory selective attention in a virtual reality classroom sce...

Instruction at school relies heavily on oral discourse. Listening comprehension is thus of major importance for successful learning. However, in many classrooms, children’s listening is impaired by unfavourable acoustic conditions such as indoor noise and reverberation. Most studies on the effects of environmental noise on children’s speech percept...

Spatial sound perception in aided listeners partly relies on hearing-aid-related transfer functions (HARTFs), describing the directional acoustic paths between a sound source and the hearing-aid (HA) microphones. Compared to head-related transfer functions (HRTFs), the HARTFs of behind-the-ear HAs exhibit substantial differences in spectro-temporal...

Listening to and remembering the content of conversations is a highly demanding task from a cognitive-psychological perspective. Particularly, in adverse listening conditions cognitive resources available for higher-level processing of speech are reduced since increased listening effort consumes more of the overall available cognitive resources. Ap...

A database of individual hearing-aid-related transfer functions (HARTFs) with high spatial resolution is presented as supplementary material to [1]. The database contains the acoustic measurements from 30 adults who were fitted with two dual-microphone behind-the-ear hearing aids (HAs). Conventional head-related transfer functions (HRTFs) were meas...

Multisensory integration has mostly been studied with focus on perceptual effects. Only few examples exist that demonstrate multisensory enhancement, e.g., for object recognition, based on semantic integration, i.e., the combination of stimulus features to form a coherent perceptual representation of the object. However, it is unclear how these per...

An audio-only paradigm for investigating auditory selective attention has previously been transferred into a classroom-type audio-visual virtual reality (VR) environment. However, directly translating such a paradigm into VR does not promise a close-to-real life scenario, as possible benefits of the virtual environment are not utilized. In the audi...

People in industrialised countries spend most of their days indoors. Since ventilation systems are not only used in industry but also increasingly in residential buildings more and more people are exposed to this noise. For a valid statement on the annoyance and the acceptance of ventilation systems when assessing noise, the A-weighted sound serves...

The assessment of noise effects in controlled listening experiments for young children (aged three to six years) is a challenging topic. Tasks must be designed appropriately for this age group. Sound reproduction methods must consider children’s smaller anthropometric head dimensions to deliver plausible spatial impressions of close-to-real life sc...

In order to analyze, understand, and remember spoken language, multiple complex cognitive processes are involved. The field of cognitive psychology aims to quantify performance in such settings regarding, e.g., comprehension, listening effort, or verbal short-term memory. A well-established paradigm to examine short-term memory performance is the s...

Children spend a considerable amount of time in educational institutions, where they are constantly exposed to noisy sound environments, which has detrimental effects on children's health and cognitive development. Extensive room acoustics measurements and long-term in-situ measurements in such institutions are scarce and are generally conducted us...

The assessment of noise effects in controlled listening experiments for young children (aged three to six years) is a challenging topic. Tasks must be designed appropriately for this age group. Sound reproduction methods must consider children’s smaller anthropometric head dimensions to deliver plausible spatial impressions of close-to-real life sc...

Children's development and education take place in educational buildings with highly complex acoustic scenes, including spatially distributed target speakers, many surrounding distracting sounds, and general background noises. Auditory selective attention, therefore, is a valuable tool to orient oneself, to focus on specific sound sources, and to e...

Background: There is increasing evidence that a complex interplay of factors within environments in which children grows up, contributes to children's suboptimal mental health and cognitive development. The concept of the life-course exposome helps to study the impact of the physical and social environment, including social inequities, on cognitiv...

This database provides five representative rooms in primary schools and preschools for acoustic simulations. A set of (binaural) room impulse responses (RIRs) simulated using an adult and a child artificial head are included for each room.

Understanding speech in noisy environments, such as classrooms, is a challenge for children. When a spatial separation is introduced between the target and masker, as compared to when both are co-located, children demonstrate intelligibility improvement of the target speech. Such intelligibility improvement is known as spatial release from masking...

Transfer path analysis (TPA) and binaural transfer path synthesis (BTPS) are suitable methods to analyze and auralize combustion engine sounds at the driver's seat. In the context of vehicle sound design, the synthesized interior sounds can be assessed by metrics that are based on psychoacoustic parameters such as roughness, sharpness or loudness....

For conversational agents’ speech, either all possible sentences have to be prerecorded by voice actors or the required utterances can be synthesized. While synthesizing speech is more flexible and economic in production, it also potentially reduces the perceived naturalness of the agents among others due to mistakes at various linguistic levels. I...