A Real-Time 3D Audio Simulator for Cognitive Hearing Science

This paper describes the development of a 3D audio simulator for use in cognitive hearing science studies and also for general 3D audio experimentation. The framework that the simulator is built upon is pyaudio_helper, which is a module of the package scikit-dsp-comm. The simulator runs in a Jupyter notebook and makes use of Jupyter widgets for interactive control of audio source positioning in 3D space. 3D audio has application in virtual reality and in hearing assistive devices (HAD) research and development. At its core the simulator uses digital filters to represent the sound pressure wave propagation path from the sound source to each ear canal of a human subject. Digital filters of 200 coefficients each for left and right ears are stored in a look-up table as a function of azimuth and elevation angles of the impinging sound’s source.