International Conference on Spatial Audio 2011

Posted on 15. April 2011 by Sascha Spors

International Conference on Spatial Audio 2011
Initial Announcement (April 14 2011) *
November 10 – 13, Hochschule für Musik, Detmold

The International Conference on Spatial Audio 2011 takes place from November 10 to 13 at Detmold University of Music.
This expert‘s summit will examine current systems for multichannel audio reproduction and complementing recording techniques, and discuss their respective strengths and weaknesses.
Wavefield synthesis systems, a higher-order Ambisonics array, as well as 5.1/7.1 installations in diverse acoustic environments will be available for comparative listening tests during the conference.
Structured plenary talks, paper and poster sessions will revisit fundamentals and present latest research.
A series of workshops will be dedicated to practical implementations of spatial sound capture and playback methods, and their esthetic and psychoacoustical implications for music perception.
Concerts that include music specially arranged for the conference will let you experience various spatial sound systems in “live” conditions.

Call for papers and music:
Your contributions are welcome, either as presentations, posters, or workshops. Submissions will undergo a review process, and accepted contributions will be published in the conference proceedings.
The conference language is English.

We are planning structured sessions on the following topics:

  • Multichannel stereo
  • Wave field synthesis
  • Higher-order Ambisonics / spherical acoustics
  • 3D systems
  • Binaural techniques

An additional session will be dedicated to related miscellaneous contributions, such as hybrid systems and perception/evaluation of spatial music reproduction.

Organizers:
Verband Deutscher Tonmeister (VDT), in cooperation with
Deutsche Gesellschaft für Akustik e.V. (DEGA), and
European Acoustics Association (EAA).

Contact/Chair:
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Malte Kob
Erich-Thienhaus-Institut
Neustadt 22, 52756 Detmold
Mail: icsa2011tonmeister.de
Phone: +49-(0)5231-975-644
Fax: +49-(0)5231-975-689

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Material zum Vortrag “Schallfeldsynthese: Stand der Technik und Perspektiven” (In German)

Posted on 25. March 2011 by Sascha Spors

Zur Verleihung des Lothar-Cremer Preises auf der 37. Jahrestagung für Akustik (DAGA 2011) in Düsseldorf habe ich einen Vortrag zu den Grundlagen und Anwendungen der Schallfeldsynthese gehalten. Im folgenden finden Sie die verwendeten Materialien und einige Zusatzinformationen:

Short english summary:
In the context of receiving the Lothar-Cremer price of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Akustik I gave a plenary talk on the theory and applications of sound field synthesis. The materials I used for the talk can be found above.

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Material zum Vortrag: “Binaurale Modellierung der Wahrnehmung mit Wellenfeldsynthese generierter Schallfelder”, DAGA 2011, Düsseldorf

Posted on 25. March 2011 by Hagen Wierstorf

Dieser Beitrag enthält Zusatzmaterialien für das Paper:

Wierstorf, Spors, Raake: Binaurale Modellierung der Wahrnehmung mit Wellenfeldsynthese generierter Schallfelder, DAGA, Düsseldorf.

Schallfeld Simulationen

Simulation einer Punktquelle positioniert bei mathbf{x}_text{s} = (0,1) m synthetisiert mit 2.5D Wellenfeldsynthese.

Simulation einer fokussierte Quelle positioniert bei mathbf{x}_text{s} = (0,-1) m synthetisiert mit 2.5D Wellenfeldsynthese.

Weitere Parameter beider Simulationen: L = 4 m, mathbf{x}_text{ref} = (0,2) m, Delta x_0 = 0.15 m.

Hörbeispiele

Bitte Kopfhörer benutzen um die räumlichen Effekte zu hören!

Die Dateien sind wie folgt benannt:

<Länge des Arrays>_<Radius>_<Winkel>_<Audiomaterial>.wav

Die Längen der Arrays betragen 10 m, 4 m, 1.8 m, 0.75 m, 0.3 m; der Radius (= Abstand zwischen fokussierter Quelle und Zuhörer) beträgt 1 m bzw. 4 m. Die fokussierte Quelle ist immer in der Mitte und einen Meter vor dem Lautsprecherarray positioniert. Die Winkel betragen 0°, 30° und 60°. Audio Materialen sind Sprache und Kastagnetten. Die Blickrichtung des Zuhörers ist jedesmal in Richtung der Quelle.

Die Audiobeispiele sind nach ihrem Sprachmaterial aufgeteilt: ZIP-Datei für die Beispiele mit Sprache, ZIP-Datei für die Beispiele mit Kastagnetten.

Weitere Infromationen können dem Vortrag entnommen werden.

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Spatio-temporal structure of sound fields synthesized by HOA & WFS

Posted on 25. March 2011 by Sascha Spors

The following two videos show the synthesis of a broadband plane wave using near-field compensated higher-order Ambisonics (NFC-HOA) and Wave Field Synthesis (WFS). A circular system with a diameter of 3 meters consisting of 56 loudspeakers was simulated numerically. The situation constitutes a 2.5-dimensional synthesis scenario.  The desired plane wave travels from the top to the bottom of the circular system. The temporal bandwidth is 44.1 kHz.

The first video shows the synthesis using 2.5D NFC-HOA

It can be observed that the desired plane wave is synthesized accurately only in small circular region in the center of the system. Outside of this region artifacts due to spatial sampling and spatial bandlimitation can be observed.

The second video shows the synthesis using 2.5D WFS

It can be observed that the first wave front of the desired plane wave is synthesized. However, behind this first wavefront a series of additional wave fronts can be seen which are due to the saptial sampling of the secondary sources.

Note, that the perceptual implications of these artifacts are not clear at the current state of research.

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Auditory Modelling Toolbox (AMT) 0.0.3 released

Posted on 2. March 2011 by Hagen Wierstorf

A new version of the Auditory Modelling Toolbox has been released. It includes now the models from Dau and Jepsen with an adaptation loop, modulation filterbank and DRNL. The only thing currently missing for these models is the optimal detector, which will be included in the next release.

To install it, you can download it from Sourceforge. You also have to install the latest version of the Linear Time/frequency Toolbox. Then in Matlab or Octave just go to the directories of the toolboxes and run:

>> ltfatstart
>> amtstart

Have a look at the demo folder. For example the following code will result in the figure below:

>> demo_audspecgram;

Spectrogram after Dau

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Special session on “Virtual Acoustics” at the Annual Convention for Acoustics (aka DAGA)

Posted on 21. February 2011 by Sascha Spors

I have called for contributions to a special session on “Virtual Acoustics” to be held at the Annual Convention of Acoustics (Jahrestagung für Akustik, DAGA) in Düsseldorf. A lot of proposals (more than 20) have been sumitted. Take a look at the very interesting programme and join the conference. Note that most of the talks/papers will be in German.

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DFG Research Unit SEACEN approved

Posted on 9. February 2011 by Sascha Spors

We are pround to announce that the DFG research unit “Simulation and Evaluation of Acoustical Environments (SEACEN)” has been approved by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. The research unit constists of 9 research projects hosted by 6 institutes.  The focus is to evaluate and improve the entire signal processing chain from the numerical modeling, the data acquisition within numerical or real sound fields, the coding and transmission to the electro acoustic reproduction by binaural technology or by sound field synthesis. The Quality and Usabilty lab is participating in the research unit with the subproject “Signal processing for the reproduction of room acoustics” which is considering the optimization of data-based rendering using binaral or sound field synthesis. A German press release announing the research unit can be found here.

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Doctoral dissertation on sound field synthesis

Posted on 15. December 2010 by Jens Ahrens

I have recently finished the official version of my doctoral dissertation on the theory of sound field synthesis. You can obtain a pdf from here.

Please cite as

Jens Ahrens: The Single-layer Potential Approach Applied to Sound Field Synthesis Including Cases of Non-enclosing Distributions of Secondary Sources. Doctoral dissertation, Technische Universität Berlin, 2010

or similarly.

It includes (amongst other things):

  • fundamentals of Wave Field Synthesis, Near-field Compensated Higher Order Ambisonics, and Spectral Division Method
  • extensive analyses of spatial aliasing artifacts

It does not include (amongst other things):

  • traditional Ambisonics
  • practical applications like moving sources, focused sources, etc.
  • perceptual expertiments
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Tutorials on Spatial Sound Reproduction

Posted on 15. December 2010 by Sascha Spors

Frank Melchior from IOSONO and Jens Ahrens/Sascha Spors from the Quality and Usability Lab have given tutorials on “Spatial Audio Reproduction” at the 128/129th Convention of the Audio Engineering Society. A focus of the tutorials lies on the paradigm shift from channel based to object-oriented production that will happen with new reproduction systems like Wave Field Synthesis (WFS) or higher-order Ambisonics (HOA).

I have uploaded the slides of both tutorials to the section “Presentation Slides” of my homepage .

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An Android Remote Control for the SoundScape Renderer

Posted on 3. December 2010 by Sascha Spors

Almost all features of the SoundScape Renderer (SSR) can be controlled by its network interface. We have implemented various clients for the SSR (e.g. using python, PureData, MATLAB) that use these capablities for remote control of the virtual scene. For quite some time we were working on a remote control for the SoundScape Renderer (SSR) running as mobile app on Android. Peter Bartz has produced a short movie demonstrating the current state of the app. The movie features binaural sound, so please use decent headphones! The audio track is composed from the original binaural audio output of the SSR (something fidelity might be lost due to the audio compression in vimeo).

Music: Housigedark by Radarfilm (radarfilm.net)
App and Video: Peter Bartz

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