Spatial Sound

Explores the principles and practical considerations of spatial sound recording and reproduction. Particular emphasis is given to the increasing importance of multichannel surround sound and 3D audio, including binaural approaches, without ignoring conventional stereo. The enhancement of spatial quality is arguably the only remaining hurdle to be overcome in pursuit of high quality sound reproduction. The rise of increasingly sophisticated spatial sound systems presents an enormous challenge to audio engineers, many of whom are confused by the possibilities and unfamiliar with standards, formats, track allocations, monitoring configurations and recording techniques. The author provides a comprehensive study of the current state of the art in spatial audio, concentrating on the most widely used approaches and configurations. Anyone wishing to expand their understanding of these cutting-edge technologies will want to own this book.

A comprehensive guide that addresses the theory and practice of spatial audio This book provides readers with the principles and best practices in spatial audio signal processing. It describes how sound fields and their perceptual attributes are captured and analyzed within the time-frequency domain, how essential representation parameters are coded, and how such signals are efficiently reproduced for practical applications. The book is split into four parts starting with an overview of the fundamentals. It then goes on to explain the reproduction of spatial sound before offering an examination of signal-dependent spatial filtering. The book finishes with coverage of both current and future applications and the direction that spatial audio research is heading in. Parametric Time-frequency Domain Spatial Audio focuses on applications in entertainment audio, including music, home cinema, and gaming—covering the capturing and reproduction of spatial sound as well as its generation, transduction, representation, transmission, and perception. This book will teach readers the tools needed for such processing, and provides an overview to existing research. It also shows recent up-to-date projects and commercial applications built on top of the systems. Provides an in-depth presentation of the principles, past developments, state-of-the-art methods, and future research directions of spatial audio technologies Includes contributions from leading researchers in the field Offers MATLAB codes with selected chapters An advanced book aimed at readers who are capable of digesting mathematical expressions about digital signal processing and sound field analysis, Parametric Time-frequency Domain Spatial Audio is best suited for researchers in academia and in the audio industry.

The field of spatial hearing has exploded in the decade or so since Jens Blauert's classic work on acoustics was first published in English. This revised edition adds a new chapter that describes developments in such areas as auditory virtual reality (an important field of application that is based mainly on the physics of spatial hearing), binaural technology (modeling speech enhancement by binaural hearing), and spatial sound-field mapping. The chapter also includes recent research on the precedence effect that provides clear experimental evidence that cognition plays a significant role in spatial hearing.The remaining four chapters in this comprehensive reference cover auditory research procedures and psychometric methods, spatial hearing with one sound source, spatial hearing with multiple sound sources and in enclosed spaces, and progress and trends from 1972 (the first German edition) to 1983 (the first English edition) -- work that includes research on the physics of the external ear, and the application of signal processing theory to modeling the spatial hearing process. There is an extensive bibliography of more than 900 items.

Spatial audio is a dynamic and rapidly evolving field, as it is closely linked to advances in computer technology and digital signal processing. The democratization of virtual reality hardware available as consumer devices has moved the field further out of traditional laboratory research, and directly into applied research targeting a wide range of consumers. Advances in Fundamental and Applied Research on Spatial Audio presents a collection of eight peer-reviewed chapters on this exciting area of research. The contributions are organized into three sections: “Acoustic Methodology”, “Perception”, and “Applications”, and cover a range of topics, addressing both headphone- and loudspeaker-based reproductions, offering both methodological overviews and specific case studies.

This book collects a wealth of information about spatial audio coding into one comprehensible volume. It is a thorough reference to the 3GPP and MPEG Parametric Stereo standards and the MPEG Surround multi-channel audio coding standard. It describes key developments in coding techniques, which is an important factor in the optimization of advanced entertainment, communications and signal processing applications. Until recently, technologies for coding audio signals, such as redundancy reduction and sophisticated source and receiver models did not incorporate spatial characteristics of source and receiving ends. Spatial audio coding achieves much higher compression ratios than conventional coders. It does this by representing multi-channel audio signals as a downmix signal plus side information that describes the perceptually-relevant spatial information. Written by experts in spatial audio coding, Spatial Audio Processing: reviews psychoacoustics (the relationship between physical measures of sound and the corresponding percepts) and spatial audio sound formats and reproduction systems; brings together the processing, acquisition, mixing, playback, and perception of spatial audio, with the latest coding techniques; analyses algorithms for the efficient manipulation of multiple, discrete and combined spatial audio channels, including both MP3 and MPEG Surround; shows how the same insights on source and receiver models can also be applied for manipulation of audio signals, such as the synthesis of virtual auditory scenes employing head-related transfer function (HRTF) processing and stereo to N-channel audio upmix. Audio processing research engineers and audio coding research and implementation engineers will find this an insightful guide. Academic audio and psychoacoustic researchers, including post-graduate and third/fourth year students taking courses in signal processing, audio and speech processing, and telecommunications, will also benefit from the information inside.

This book collects a wealth of information about spatial audio coding into one comprehensible volume. It is a thorough reference to the 3GPP and MPEG Parametric Stereo standards and the MPEG Surround multi-channel audio coding standard. It describes key developments in coding techniques, which is an important factor in the optimization of advanced entertainment, communications and signal processing applications. Until recently, technologies for coding audio signals, such as redundancy reduction and sophisticated source and receiver models did not incorporate spatial characteristics of source and receiving ends. Spatial audio coding achieves much higher compression ratios than conventional coders. It does this by representing multi-channel audio signals as a downmix signal plus side information that describes the perceptually-relevant spatial information. Written by experts in spatial audio coding, Spatial Audio Processing: reviews psychoacoustics (the relationship between physical measures of sound and the corresponding percepts) and spatial audio sound formats and reproduction systems; brings together the processing, acquisition, mixing, playback, and perception of spatial audio, with the latest coding techniques; analyses algorithms for the efficient manipulation of multiple, discrete and combined spatial audio channels, including both MP3 and MPEG Surround; shows how the same insights on source and receiver models can also be applied for manipulation of audio signals, such as the synthesis of virtual auditory scenes employing head-related transfer function (HRTF) processing and stereo to N-channel audio upmix. Audio processing research engineers and audio coding research and implementation engineers will find this an insightful guide. Academic audio and psychoacoustic researchers, including post-graduate and third/fourth year students taking courses in signal processing, audio and speech processing, and telecommunications, will also benefit from the information inside.

This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue "Sound and Music Computing" that was published in Applied Sciences

Game Sound Technology and Player Interaction: Concepts and Developments researches both how game sound affects a player psychologically, emotionally, and physiologically, and how this relationship itself impacts the design of computer game sound and the development of technology. This compilation also applies beyond the realm of video games to other types of immersive sound, such as soundscape design, gambling machines, emotive and fantastical sound to name a few. The application for this research is wide-ranging, interdisciplinary, and of primary importance for academics and practitioners searching for the right sounds.