Edinburgh Napier University

  The use of sound to create or enhance the sense of presence is well recognized and the measurements of which have focused on hearing, e.g. “were you able to identify a particular sound?”, “how well could you localize the sounds”. To this treatment of audition we now add, listening. Listening is active, directed, intentional hearing. This aspect of the phenomenology of sound - listening - has received relatively little attention from the presence community. Focusing on listening has one further consequence - it underlines the corporeality of the listener. Listening is not merely ego-centric it is body-centric. Hearing, in contrast, is allo-centric – “The sounds appears to be coming from over there”. We suggest that an exploration of the nature of listening in virtual environments may contribute to the understanding of presence and its relation to corporeality. A classification scheme is proposed and applied to an empirical study of listening in real and simulated environments.