Tournament formats as method for determining best-fitting HRTF profiles

Abstract

An approach is presented how to practically determine best-fitting HRTF profiles for individuals wearing conventional headphones and bone conduction headphones. The latter may be particularly useful for visually impaired people (e.g., for navigation applications), as the outer ear is not covered and the perception of environmental sounds is not affected. For a fast and user-friendly identification of best-fitting HRTFs, different tournament methods are compared. There are several studies that investigate (a) aspects of spatial sound perception with bone conduction headphones and (b) tournament systems as selection procedure for best-fitting HRTFs, but to our knowledge there is no study that analyzes the interdependence of (a) and (b). Compared with other tournament systems the swiss system tournament produces more accurate results than a knock-out tournament in less time than the round-robin tournament system. By matching the preferred HRTF profiles against each other early on, a direct comparison between these profiles can be achieved. In addition profiles disadvantaged by the randomized algorithm in earlier rounds are not excluded but still matched against similar profiles worth considering and still have a chance to compete in later rounds. Therefore the swiss system tournament offers a viable solution in determining fitting HRTF profiles. © 2019 Proceedings of the International Congress on Acoustics. All rights reserved.