Positioning of Musical Foreground Parts in Surrounding Sound Stages

C Hold, L Nagel, H Wierstorf, A Raake, "Positioning of Musical Foreground Parts in Surrounding Sound Stages," in AES International Conference on Audio for Virtual and Augmented Reality, Paper 7-2 (2016). [ link ] [ paper ]

Bibtex

@inproceedings{Hold2016c,
    title     = {Positioning of Musical Foreground Parts in Surrounding Sound
                 Stages},
    author    = {Hold, Christoph and Nagel, Lukas and Wierstorf, Hagen
                 and Raake, Alexander},
    booktitle = {AES International Conference on Audio for Virtual and Augmented
                 Reality},
    address   = {Los Angeles, CA},
    pages     = {Paper 7-2},
    month     = {October},
    year      = {2016},
    url       = {http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=18505}
}

Abstract

Object based audio offers several new possibilities during the sound mixing process. While stereophonic mixing techniques are highly developed, not all of them generate promising results in an object-based audio environment. An outstanding feature is the new approach of positioning sound objects in the musical sound scene, providing the opportunity of stable localization throughout the whole listening area. Previous studies have shown that even if object-based audio reproduction systems can enhance the playback situation, the critical and guiding attributes of the mix are still uncertain. This study investigates the impact of different spatial distributions of sound objects on listener preference, with a special emphasis on the distinction of high attention foreground parts of the presented music track.

Supplementary Material

The music mixes employed in this study are available from http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.61000. Note, that the final mix provides the driving signals for a circular loudspeaker array with 56 channels. If you would like to reproduce it on another system you can generate the driving signals yourself by using the SoundScape Renderer, in which you have to load the scene files and feed in the signals of the single objects for the song “lighthouse”.