Browsing by Author "Korshunova, Viktoriya"

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The impact of sound systems on the perception of cinematic content in immersive audio-visual productions
(2019) Korshunova, Viktoriya
School of Arts, Design and Architecture | Master's thesis
With fast technological developments, traditional perceptual environments gradually fade away, and new ones emerge. These changes force human senses to adapt to new ways of perceptual understanding, for example, regarding the perceptual integration of sound and vision. This study aimed to understand human perception of visual and auditory signals. Proceeding from the fact that hearing cooperates with visual attention processes, the purpose is to investigate the effect of different sound design conditions on the perception of cinematic content in immersive audio-visual reproductions. In this thesis, introduced the results of a visual selective attention task (counting objects) performed by participants watching 9-second stimuli from the movie (“Ego Cure”) on 270-degree immersive audio-visual display. Four sound conditions were used, which employed an increasing number of loudspeakers, i.e., mono, stereo, 5.1 and 7.1.4. During the task, an eye-tracking device was used to record the participant’s eye gaze data. Additionally, here introduced authors own findings from two perspectives: sound engineer and psychoacoustics researcher. The eye-tracking data showed that an increased number of speakers and a wider spatial audio distribution diffused the participants’ attention from the task-related part of the display to non-task-related directions. The number of participants focusing on the task-irrelevant display in the 7.1.4 condition was higher than in the mono audio condition. Additionally, pupil dilation data showed that 5.1 and 7.1.4 sound conditions had more dilation than the other sound systems. Therefore, possible to conclude that it was more difficult for the subjects to perform during 5.1 and 7.1.4 audio conditions. This result implies that additional spatial cues in the auditory modality automatically influence human visual attention (involuntary eye movements) and human analysis of visual information. Sound engineers should consider this when mixing educational or any other information-oriented productions.