DEFINITION: Auralization is the process of rendering audible, by physical or mathematical modeling, the sound field of a source in a space, in such a way as to simulate the binaural listening experience at a given position in the modeled space.
"Huh?", you may ask yourself? Here's the translation:
Human beings hear things by virtue of pressure waves impinging on their eardrums, OK? All of the information that we need to know about the sound (such as volume, frequency content, direction, etc.) is contained in those pressure waves (or so we believe). What an auralization system tries to do is to fool your brain into thinking that you're listening to a sound source in an acoustical space (i.e., room) that you're not in. How it does this is to take the original sound source and alter the frequency spectrum according to both (i) how the room affects the wave and (ii) how your head/ears affect the wave. Once this is done, you play back two signals (one for each ear) through, for example, headphones and listen. Hopefully, you get the sense that what you are listening to is what you would actually hear if you were really in the room with the source. Simple enough, right?
Auralization can be applied in lots of ways. Since it's not really necessary for the room of interest to exist, the system can be used to create "virtual auditory displays". Basically, that would be the audio counterpart to virtual reality. One can also apply auralization in lots more noble ways, such as aiding the hearing-impaired, or in education of people who rely on their hearing to do their job well (like sound-techs or musicians, for example). I'm sure once the technology is developed, people will find a use for it...
Anyways, that's what auralization is. Hopefully I can design and implement a system that's not too hardware or computationally intensive (so that it will run on a PC or cheap DSP platform), but is still pretty "accurate". At the least I can hope to decide which parts of the chain are most important...wish me luck!