The transfer of multichannel spatialization schemes from the studio to the concert hall presents numerous challenges to the contemporary spatial music composer or engineer. The presence of a reverberant listening environment coupled with a distributed audience are significant factors in the presentation of multichannel spatial music. This paper presents a review of the existing research on the localization performance of various spatialization techniques and their ability to cater for a distributed audience. As the firststep in a major comparative study of such techniques, the results of listening tests for monophonic source localization for a distributed audience in a reverberant space are presented. These results provide a measure of the best possible performance that can be expected from any spatialization technique under similar conditions. Keywords: Sound localization, distributed audience, spatial music.

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