Spatial Audio: Books and Articles

This open access book provides a concise explanation of the fundamentals and background of the surround sound recording and playback technology Ambisonics. It equips readers with the psychoacoustical, signal processing, acoustical, and mathematical knowledge needed to understand the inner workings of modern processing utilities, special equipment for recording, manipulation, and reproduction in the higher-order Ambisonic format. The book comes with various practical examples based on free software tools and open scientific data for reproducible research. The book's introductory section offers a perspective on Ambisonics spanning from the origins of coincident recordings in the 1930s to the Ambisonic concepts of the 1970s, as well as classical ways of applying Ambisonics in first-order coincident sound scene recording and reproduction that have been practiced since the 1980s. As, from time to time, the underlying mathematics become quite involved, but should be comprehensive without sacrificing readability, the book includes an extensive mathematical appendix. The book offers readers a deeper understanding of Ambisonic technologies, and will especially benefit scientists, audio-system and audio-recording engineers. In the advanced sections of the book, fundamentals and modern techniques as higher-order Ambisonic decoding, 3D audio effects, and higher-order recording are explained. Those techniques are shown to be suitable to supply audience areas ranging from studio-sized to hundreds of listeners, or headphone-based playback, regardless whether it is live, interactive, or studio-produced 3D audio material.

Immersive Sound: The Art and Science of Binaural and Multi-Channel Audio provides a comprehensive guide to multi-channel sound. With contributions from leading recording engineers, researchers, and industry experts, Immersive Sound includes an in-depth description of the physics and psychoacoustics of spatial audio as well as practical applications. Chapters include the history of 3D sound, binaural reproduction over headphones and loudspeakers, stereo, surround sound, height channels, object-based audio, soundfield (ambisonics), wavefield synthesis, and multi-channel mixing techniques. Knowledge of the development, theory, and practice of spatial and multi-channel sound is essential to those advancing the research and applications in the rapidly evolving fields of 3D sound recording, augmented and virtual reality, gaming, film sound, music production, and post-production.

* The V.A.S.S.T. Instant Series features a visually oriented, step-by-step instructional style that effectively guides readers through complex processes. * Surround sound is rapidly displacing stereophonic sound as the accepted standard. * This low-price-point book is an easy buy to provide the reader a foundation in the technology that will serve them regardless of the software they chose. Instant Surround Sound demystifies the multichannel process for both musical and visual environments. This comprehensive resource teaches techniques for mixing and encoding for surround sound. It is packed with tips and tricks that help the reader to avoid the most common (and uncommon) pitfalls. This is the fifth title in the new V.A.S.S.T. Instant Series. Music and visual producers can enhance the listening experience and engage their audience more effectively with the improved perceptive involvement of surround sound. Record, process, and deliver effective and stunning surround sound to your listener with the aid of this guide. Packed with useful, accessible information for novice and experienced users alike, you get carefully detailed screenshots, step-by-step directions, and creative suggestions for producing better audio projects.

Stereo is everywhere. The whole culture and industry of music and sound became organized around the principle of stereophony during the twentieth century. But nothing about this-not the invention or acceptance or ubiquity of stereo-was inevitable. Nor did the aesthetic conventions, technological objects, and listening practices required to make sense of stereo emerge fully formed, out of the blue. This groundbreaking book uncovers the vast amount of work that has been required to make stereo seem natural, and which has been necessary to maintain stereo's place as a dominant mode of sound reproduction for over half a century. The essays contained within this book are thematically grouped under (Audio) Positions, Listening Cultures, and Multichannel Sound and Screen Media; the cumulative effect is to advance research in music, sound, and media studies and to build new bridges between the fields. With contributions from leading scholars across several disciplines, Living Stereo re-tells the history of twentieth-century aural and musical culture through the lens of stereophonic sound.

Spatial audio quality is a highly multifaceted concept, with many interactions between environmental, geometrical, anatomical, psychological, and contextual considerations. Methods for characterization or evaluation of the geometrical components of spatial audio quality, however, remain scarce, despite being perhaps the least subjective aspect of spatial audio quality to quantify. By considering interchannel time and level differences relative to a reference signal, it is possible to construct a signal model to isolate some of the spatial distortion. By using a combination of least-square optimization and heuristics, we propose a signal decomposition method to isolate the spatial error from a processed signal, in terms of interchannel gain leakages and changes in relative delays. This allows the computation of simple energy-ratio metrics, providing objective measures of spatial and non-spatial signal qualities, with minimal assumptions and no dataset dependency. Experiments demonstrate the robustness of the method against common spatial signal degradation introduced by, e.g., audio compression and music source separation. Implementation is available at https://github.com/karnwatcharasupat/spauq

An overview of emerging topics, theories, methods, and practices in sonic interactive design, with a focus on the multisensory aspects of sonic experience. Sound is an integral part of every user experience but a neglected medium in design disciplines. Design of an artifact's sonic qualities is often limited to the shaping of functional, representational, and signaling roles of sound. The interdisciplinary field of sonic interaction design (SID) challenges these prevalent approaches by considering sound as an active medium that can enable novel sensory and social experiences through interactive technologies. This book offers an overview of the emerging SID research, discussing theories, methods, and practices, with a focus on the multisensory aspects of sonic experience. Sonic Interaction Design gathers contributions from scholars, artists, and designers working at the intersections of fields ranging from electronic music to cognitive science. They offer both theoretical considerations of key themes and case studies of products and systems created for such contexts as mobile music, sensorimotor learning, rehabilitation, and gaming. The goal is not only to extend the existing research and pedagogical approaches to SID but also to foster domains of practice for sound designers, architects, interaction designers, media artists, product designers, and urban planners. Taken together, the chapters provide a foundation for a still-emerging field, affording a new generation of designers a fresh perspective on interactive sound as a situated and multisensory experience. Contributors Federico Avanzini, Gerold Baier, Stephen Barrass, Olivier Bau, Karin Bijsterveld, Roberto Bresin, Stephen Brewster, Jeremy Coopersotck, Amalia De Gotzen, Stefano Delle Monache, Cumhur Erkut, George Essl, Karmen Franinovic, Bruno L. Giordano, Antti Jylhä, Thomas Hermann, Daniel Hug, Johan Kildal, Stefan Krebs, Anatole Lecuyer, Wendy Mackay, David Merrill, Roderick Murray-Smith, Sile O'Modhrain, Pietro Polotti, Hayes Raffle, Michal Rinott, Davide Rocchesso, Antonio Rodà, Christopher Salter, Zack Settel, Stefania Serafin, Simone Spagnol, Jean Sreng, Patrick Susini, Atau Tanaka, Yon Visell, Mike Wezniewski, John Williamson

Providing vital reading for audio students and trainee engineers, this guide is ideal for anyone who wants a solid grounding in both theory and industry practices in audio, sound and recording. There are many books on the market covering "how to work it" when it comes to audio equipment--but Sound and Recording isn't one of them. Instead, you'll gain an understanding of "how it works" with this approachable guide to audio systems. New to this edition: Digital audio section revised substantially to include the latest developments in audio networking (e.g. RAVENNA, AES X-192, AVB), high-resolution surround and parametric audio coding, workstation processing technology, mastering for iTunes, and loudness normalization Coverage of immersive audio systems such as Dolby Atmos, Auro 3D and WFS along with recent developments in audio object coding Sections on digital radio microphones, loudspeaker sensitivity issues and development, and highly directional loudspeaker systems Substantial new sections on recent developments in audio network device discovery and control and the Open Control Architecture

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.

Spatial audio and 3-Dimensional sound rendering techniques play a pivotal and essential role in immersive audio experiences. Head-Related Transfer Functions (HRTFs) are acoustic filters which represent how sound interacts with an individual's unique head and ears anatomy. The use of HRTFs compliant to the subjects anatomical traits is crucial to ensure a personalized and unique spatial experience. This work proposes the implementation of an HRTF individualization method based on anthropometric features automatically extracted from ear images using a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Firstly, a CNN is implemented and tested to assess the performance of machine learning on positioning landmarks on ear images.

This paper addresses the challenges associated with both the conversion between different spatial audio formats and the decoding of a spatial audio format to a specific loudspeaker layout. Existing approaches often rely on layout remapping tools, which may not guarantee optimal conversion from a psychoacoustic perspective. To overcome these challenges, we present the Universal Spatial Audio Transcoder (USAT) method and its corresponding open source implementation. USAT generates an optimal decoder or transcoder for any input spatial audio format, adapting it to any output format or 2D/3D loudspeaker configuration. Drawing upon optimization techniques based on psychoacoustic principles, the algorithm maximizes the preservation of spatial information. We present examples of the decoding and transcoding of several audio formats, and show that USAT approach is advantageous compared to the most common methods in the field.