Predicting Directional Sound-Localization of Human Listeners in both Horizontal and Vertical Dimensions

Measuring and understanding spatial hearing is a fundamental step to create effective virtual auditory displays (VADs). The evaluation of such auralization systems often requires psychoacoustic experiments. This process can be time consuming and error prone, resulting in a bottleneck for the evaluation complexity. In this work we evaluated a probabilistic auditory model for sound localization intended as a tool to assess VAD's abilities to provide static sound-localization cues to listeners. The outcome of the model, compared with actual results of psychoacoustic experiments, shows the advantages and limitations of this systematic evaluation.