Recent advancements in massive multi-channel auralization

J Ahrens, H Wierstorf, "Recent advancements in massive multi-channel auralization," in 170th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, (2015).

Bibtex

@misc{Ahrens2015,
    title     = {Recent advancements in massive multi-channel auralization},
    author    = {Ahrens, Jens and Wierstorf, Hagen},
    booktitle = {170th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America},
    publisher = {Acoustical Society of America},
    address   = {Jacksonville, FL},
    month     = {November},
    year      = {2015}
}

Abstract

Massive multi-channel auralization approaches like Wave Field Synthesis and Higher Order Ambisonics experienced a pronounced hype in the late 2000s during which the primary research goal was maximizing the physical accuracy of the synthetic sound fields that they create. The hype eventually faded as the achievable advancements turned out to be limited due to fundamental restrictions. Though, activities are still being pursued in the domain with the focus shifted towards perception of synthetic sound fields. This talk gives an overview over current activities, which aim at understanding localization, timbre, and spatial impression in general. The results show that localization performance in synthetic sound fields is close to the performance in real sound fields. Timbre and spatial impression exhibit impairments that are directly linked to the physical limitations of the employed systems. Promising options for improvements regarding the synthesis of artificial reverberation are discussed.