Spaces in between - Towards ambiguity in immersive audio experiences

Immersive audio experiences position the listener at the centre of a sound field created by loudspeakers or headphones often attempting to achieve a sense of belonging and embodiment. The focus on placing the listener amongst multiple sound sources with individual localisation and propagation patterns goes somewhat towards recreating everyday like listening experiences, which typically involve hundreds if not thousands of sources in complex acoustics perceived differently by each listener based on movement and head rotation not to mention individual hearing profiles. This paper focuses on the, as of yet, largely unexplored listening space which sits between headphone and loudspeaker reproduction. This unexplored space affords multiple approaches when it comes to creating ambiguous listening situations in which there is a deliberate attempt to blur, augment or even contradict the relationship between headphone and loudspeaker sound fields. We propose a set of strategies which can be deployed in the development of Auditory Virtual Environments (AVE) aimed at creating spaces in between. The paper combines technical, design and creative approaches based on recent artworks, to illustrate ways in which to explore the notion of ambiguity in immersive audio experiences. © 2018 Pedro Rebelo et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 3.0 Unported, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.