The goal of an Auditory Virtual Environment (AVE) is to evoke auditory perceptions in human listeners that correspond to simulated acoustic scenarios. To this end, the AVE generator computes binaural signals that are perceived as highly plausible or even natural. Thus, the listeners should experience a spatial sense of the virtual environment and be able to perceive their movement in this space as well as the movement of the sound sources.

Depending on the application, the system generating an AVE may implement a variety of features: the user may be only a passive receiver or may interact with the environment. Furthermore, the design goal may be to closely match or predict the auditory perceptions perceived in a given real-world environment, or it may include non-realistic elements such as a different speed of sound. AVEs are therefore excellent tools for conducting listening experiments under varying and highly controllable conditions.

An important aspect in the design of AVEs is to distinguish between the auditory event in the perceptual domain and the sound event in the physical domain and to describe the relationship between them in terms of psychophysical functions. Furthermore, their design must take into account that the listener's perception is not only dependent on external stimuli. It is also influenced by, for example, the listener's auditory experience, attention, and expectations. Cross-modal effects must also be considered (Blauert 2005). For this purpose, AVE can be combined with visual and haptic modalities.