In the simplest sense, people experience ‘spatial hearing’ whenever they judge the location of a sound’s source. A bird calling from the left. A person speaking from the right. A car passing from left to right. An airplane flying overhead, etc.
Yet, judgments of sound-source direction do not fully capture what most listeners experience under typical listening conditions. The sense of the room within which a person is speaking, for instance. The sense of trees near a calling bird. Ocean waves rolling on a beach!
As for theories and computational models of spatial hearing, numerous acoustic and neural models exist to explain ‘spatial hearing’ in the simplest sense. That is, how listeners are able to judge direction under ideal listening conditions.
The goal of this website, and the edge model specifically, is to propose an explanation for how listeners experience so much more than the sense of ‘direction’ under typical listening.