Novel Vertical Localization Using Spectral Cues Analysis from Artificial Human Ears

The ability to detect and localize the direction of the source of sounds has been with humans since ancient times, as humans can tell the direction of the sound coming from both the horizontal plane and vertical plane. Recent theory on why humans can distinguish the direction of the sound in the vertical plane is due to the difference between sounds reflected in human ears, more specifically, the pinna, which distort the sound in both the frequency domain and the time domain. In this paper, we will explore more on how to use the distortion in the time domain to localize the sound in the vertical plane. By analyzing the sound that is reflected in one of the artificial ears in the time domain, we use those data as a model to determine the sound coming from the vertical plane. The average angular error of the model is 4.86 degrees, with an RMSE of 6.90. The result confirms that we can analyze the sound in the time domain to determine the sound source direction in the vertical plane analyzed from only one microphone in the artificial ear.