Thompson D.

There exists extensive potential for the design of aural environments to inform – or to transform – temporal perception of space, spatial relationships, and ideas or activities occurring within transitional architecture. Trial spatial sound documentations of a transitional space have been made previously, combining the concept of a soundwalk with auralisation techniques of built environments. Spatial soundwalk recordings (two stereo configurations and ambisonic B-format) were recently presented in a specialist multi-channel studio to a panel of expert listeners. This paper follows one presented under the same title in 2005, that introduced early trials of the methodology and preliminary results. Here, a refined experimental procedure is presented, and findings are discussed in respect to the task and context of documenting the complex soundspace of transitional architecture. It was found that spatialisation of recorded sound did generally improve listener ability to perform localisation tasks, but that full periphonic reproduction did not consistently enhance listener impression of a virtual soundspace. A public atrium in Federation Square, Melbourne, is the space that was recorded for source material.