SPATIAL AUDITORY REPRESENTATION IN THE CASE OF THE VISUALLY IMPAIRED PEOPLE (original) (raw)
Related papers
Acta Physica Polonica A, 2013
The study was undertaken to check the eect of 3D sound recording and reproduction methods on performance in localization of sound source by the visually impaired and normally sighted subjects. The performance was evaluated on the basis of the ability to identify the direction from which the sound comes and the direction of its propagation. The experiment involved a test in which the subjects were exposed to sounds reproduced by two methods of spatial reproduction: binaural (headphones) and Ambisonics (loudspeaker). The binaural recordings were reproduced through two types of headphones, open and closed ones, and the recordings were made with the help of a dummy head. The recordings for loudspeaker reproduction were made with the use of two microphone matrices, Octava and Panasonic. The subjects were adults and children, including blind and VIC. They had otologically normal hearing. The test included realization of three tasks. The rst concerned identication of the direction from which sound has come from an immovable source, a rattle or a drum. In the second and third task, the subjects were asked to indicate the direction of motion of the source of sound (vehicle). For the adults, the method of recording and reproduction of sound had little eect on the test results. For the VIC, a signicant dierence was noted between the results of headphone and loudspeaker exposure, to the advantage of the headphone exposure. The method of binaural recording and sound exposure through headphones seems much more eective for auditory training of VIC.
The role of sound cues in the spatial knowledge of blind individuals
International journal of special education
The study presented here sought to explore the role of auditory cues in the spatial knowledge of blind individuals by examining the relation between the perceived auditory cues and the landscape of a given area and by investigating how blind individuals use auditory cues to create cognitive maps. The findings reveal that several auditory cues characterize the study area and are linked to a number of its spatial features. Moreover, the results indicate that, through their sense of hearing, individuals with visual impairments create cognitive maps which include information about spatial relationships of environmental objects/attributes.
Scientific Reports
Blindness leads to substantial enhancements in many auditory abilities, and deficits in others. It is unknown how severe visual losses need to be before changes in auditory abilities occur, or whether the relationship between severity of visual loss and changes in auditory abilities is proportional and systematic. Here we show that greater severity of visual loss is associated with increased auditory judgments of distance and room size. on average participants with severe visual losses perceived sounds to be twice as far away, and rooms to be three times larger, than sighted controls. Distance estimates for sighted controls were most accurate for closer sounds and least accurate for farther sounds. As the severity of visual impairment increased, accuracy decreased for closer sounds and increased for farther sounds. However, it is for closer sounds that accurate judgments are needed to guide rapid motor responses to auditory events, e.g. planning a safe path through a busy street to avoid collisions with other people, and falls. Interestingly, greater visual impairment severity was associated with more accurate room size estimates. the results support a new hypothesis that crossmodal calibration of audition by vision depends on the severity of visual loss.
The Role of Auditory Cues in the Spatial Knowledge of Blind Individuals
2012
The study presented here sought to explore the role of auditory cues in the spatial knowledge of blind individuals by examining the relation between the perceived auditory cues and the landscape of a given area and by investigating how blind individuals use auditory cues to create cognitive maps. The findings reveal that several auditory cues characterize the study area and are linked to a number of its spatial features. Moreover, the results indicate that, through their sense of hearing, individuals with visual impairments create cognitive maps which include information about spatial relationships of environmental objects/attributes.
Reaching to sound accuracy in the peri-personal space of blind and sighted humans
2012
With the aim of designing an assistive device for the Blind, we compared the ability of blind and sighted subjects to accurately locate several types of sounds generated in the peri-personal space. Despite a putative lack of calibration of their auditory system with vision, blind subjects performed with a similar accuracy as sighted subjects. The average error was sufficiently low (10° in azimuth and 10 cm in distance) to orient a user towards a specific goal or to guide a hand grasping movement to a nearby object.
Spatial navigation with horizontally spatialized sounds in early and late blind individuals
PLoS ONE, 2021
Blind individuals often report difficulties to navigate and to detect objects placed outside their peri-personal space. Although classical sensory substitution devices could be helpful in this respect, these devices often give a complex signal which requires intensive training to analyze. New devices that provide a less complex output signal are therefore needed. Here, we evaluate a smartphone-based sensory substitution device that offers navigation guidance based on strictly spatial cues in the form of horizontally spatialized sounds. The system uses multiple sensors to either detect obstacles at a distance directly in front of the user or to create a 3D map of the environment (detection and avoidance mode, respectively), and informs the user with auditory feedback. We tested 12 early blind, 11 late blind and 24 blindfolded-sighted participants for their ability to detect obstacles and to navigate in an obstacle course. The three groups did not differ in the number of objects detec...
BINAURAL SOUND ANALYSIS AND SPATIAL LOCALIZATION FOR THE VISUALLY IMPAIRED PEOPLE
The blind people face serious difficulties concerning exclusion from working activities, lack of social involvement and having a sedentary lifestyle. The blind individuals can, however, enhance their life quality by using powerful and effective assistive devices that would help them to perform navigational and orientation tasks and to build a rich mental representation of the environment. An assistive system for the visually impaired people needs to fulfill certain usability requirements, such as to be wearable and affordable and to provide a large quantity of information as efficiently as possible in order to give the user a natural-like perception of the settings. The purpose of our research is to develop an assistive device for the blind people, based on alternative sensory modalities, such as hearing (by encoding the visual information into sound) and touch (by providing additional information through vibrations and other haptic cues). This paper presents the results achieved so far in our research, concerning the sonification and training techniques that will be applied for the development of the proposed assistive system.
Virtual Sound Localization by Blind People
Archives of Acoustics, 2015
The paper demonstrates that blind people localize sounds more accurately than sighted people by using monaural and/or binaural cues.In the experiment, blind people participated in two tests; the first one took place in the laboratory and the second one in the real environment under different noise conditions. A simple click sound was employed and processed with non-individual head related transfer functions. The sounds were delivered by a system with a maximum azimuth of 32° to the left side and 32° to the right side of the participant’s head at a distance ranging from 0.3 m up to 5 m.The present paper describes the experimental methods and results of virtual sound localization by blind people through the use of a simple electronic travel aid based on an infrared laser pulse and the time of flight distance measurement principle. The lack of vision is often compensated by other perceptual abilities, such as the tactile or hearing ability.The results show that blind people easily perc...
Sensors
Spatial cognition is a daily life ability, developed in order to be able to understand and interact with our environment. Even if all the senses are involved in mental representation of space elaboration, the lack of vision makes it more difficult, especially because of the importance of peripheral information in updating the relative positions of surrounding landmarks when one is moving. Spatial audio technology has long been used for studies of human perception, particularly in the area of auditory source localisation. The ability to reproduce individual sounds at desired positions, or complex spatial audio scenes, without the need to manipulate physical devices has provided researchers with many benefits. We present a review of several studies employing the power of spatial audio virtual reality for research in spatial cognition with blind individuals. These include studies investigating simple spatial configurations, architectural navigation, reaching to sounds, and sound design...
Improved auditory spatial sensitivity in near-sighted subjects
Brain research. Cognitive brain research, 2000
There is a great deal of anecdotal and empirical evidence in favor of compensatory plasticity of the sensorial modalities when one of them undergoes a total deficit. Yet, while most research has focused on the development of spatial hearing in totally blind individuals, there are few works dealing with auditory compensation in the case of a partial visual deprivation. In the present study, three experiments show that subjects undergoing a visual deficit like myopia are more accurate at localizing sounds than normal-sighted subjects.