The use of individualised Head Related Transfer Functions (HRTF) is a fundamental prerequisite for obtaining an accurate rendering of 3D spatialised sounds in virtual auditory environments. The HRTFs are transfer functions that define the acoustical basis of auditory perception of a sound source in space and are frequently used in virtual auditory displays to simulate free-field listening conditions. However, they depend on the anatomical characteristics of the human body and significantly vary among individuals, so that the use of the same dataset of HRTFs for all the users of a designed system will not offer the same level of auditory performance. This paper presents an alternative approach to the use on non-individualised HRTFs that is based on a procedural learning, training, and adaptation to altered auditory cues.We tested the sound localisation performance of nine sighted and visually impaired people, before and after a series of perceptual (auditory, visual, and haptic) feedback based training sessions. The results demonstrated that our subjects significantly improved their spatial hearing under altered listening conditions (such as the presentation of 3D binaural sounds synthesised from non-individualized HRTFs), the improvement being reflected into a higher localisation accuracy and a lower rate of front-back confusion errors.

The impact of musical experience on results concerning sound perception in selected auditory tasks, such as pitch discrimination, pitch-timbre categorization and pitch memorization for blind and visually impaired children and teenagers is discussed. Subjects were divided into three groups: of those with no experience of music, with small musical experience and with substantial musical experience. The blind and visually impaired subjects were investigated, while sighted persons formed reference groups. To date no study has described impact of musical experience on results of such experiments for blind and visually impaired children and teenagers. Our results suggest that blind persons with musical experience may be more sensitive to frequency differences and differences in timbre between two signals as well as may have better short-term auditory memory than blind people with no musical experience. Musical experience of visually impaired persons does not necessary lead to better performance in all conducted auditory tasks.