  This article presents an interactive system for stage acoustics
experimentation including considerations for hearing one's own and others'
instruments. The quality of real-time auralization systems for psychophysical
experiments on music performance depends on the system's calibration and
latency, among other factors (e.g. visuals, simulation methods, haptics, etc).
The presented system focuses on the acoustic considerations for laboratory
implementations. The calibration is implemented as a set of filters accounting
for the microphone-instrument distances and the directivity factors, as well as
the transducers' frequency responses. Moreover, sources of errors are
characterized using both state-of-the-art information and derivations from the
mathematical definition of the calibration filter. In order to compensate for
hardware latency without cropping parts of the simulated impulse responses, the
virtual direct sound of musicians hearing themselves is skipped from the
simulation and addressed by letting the actual direct sound reach the listener
through open headphones. The required latency compensation of the interactive
part (i.e. hearing others) meets the minimum distance requirement between
musicians, which is 2 m for the implemented system. Finally, a proof of concept
is provided that includes objective and subjective experiments, which give
support to the feasibility of the proposed setup.
