Spatial impression of source widening effect for binaural audio production

Creation of widths of sound objects is necessary for natural and complex spatial reproduction. To investigate the effect on spatial impression when applied to audio production, source widening processing for binaural synthesis was implemented as a VST plugin which could be used in digital audio workstation. The plugin was provided for mixing sound effects for video clips, to control localizations and widths of sound objects for binaural reproduction. Multiple versions of mix were created and a subjective listening experiment was conducted to evaluate the overall spatial impression of the mixes. The result indicated that the source widening effect could improve the spatial impression although the performance might depend on nature of the source or the individual preferences.