Living Worlds

Research · Sound and space · Oct 10, 2026

Four rooms never seen, from twelve measured positions

Met (4 of 4 rooms)1,282 positions in four rooms

The test at a glance

What it tests
Accuracy against reality: how a room sounds at positions not measured, in rooms never used before.
Data
Hearing Anything Anywhere (Wang et al., CVPR 2024; Zenodo 11195833, CC BY 4.0): a classroom, a dampened room, a hallway and a complex room; T, EDT and C50 per octave band, 125 Hz to 4 kHz.
Held out
Every position but the 12 measured in each room: 463, 198, 423 and 198 positions.
Compared against
The calibrated formula corrected by the 5 nearest measured positions, the method that met twice before; also memory alone and image sources with memory.
Bar
Sign test p < 0.05 AND the 95% interval of the mean score difference above zero AND a higher mean in at least 3 of the 4 rooms.
Result
+0.069 (0.066 to 0.073), higher at 1,089 of 1,282 positions and in 4 of 4 rooms: met. Memory alone scored 0.417 pooled, the field 0.394.

Measured at 12 positions, each room was predicted at every other position: how long sound takes to die away (T and EDT) and how clear it is (C50), in each octave band, scored against the smallest difference a listener can hear (1 is exact). In four public rooms never used before, a classroom, a dampened room, a hallway and a complex room, the calibrated formula carried to new positions by a learned field scored 0.394 against 0.325 for the same formula corrected by its five nearest measurements, the method that met twice before: 0.069 higher (95% interval 0.066 to 0.073), higher at 1,089 positions and lower at 193, and higher in all four rooms, where three were needed. Registered before any response in these rooms was opened. Image sources with the same memory scored 0.312. The mean of the five nearest measured positions alone scored 0.417, above the field in every room (classroom 0.418 against 0.416, dampened 0.273 against 0.271, hallway 0.467 against 0.405, complex 0.452 against 0.444); the registered test compared the field with the formula and its memory, and it does not show the field ahead of memory alone.

Protocol, result and scorer

Sound and space

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