The past decade saw substantial advancements in various areas of spatial audio. First of all, new surround sound formats employing so-called “height” loudspeakers have been introduced, aiming to provide the audience with three-dimensional (3D) listening experiences. This has led to active research on the perceptual mechanism of vertical stereophony as well as the development of new recording and mixing techniques for such formats.Object-based audio (OBA) is a new approach for producing and delivering spatial audio content, which is being rapidly adopted by the film and broadcast industries. OBA utilizes metadata for each audio object in order to flexibly render spatial audio to best suit the user’s playback system, as opposed to conventional channel-based audio (CBA) that relies on a specific loudspeaker configuration.Furthermore, a scene-based audio (SBA) format has also been advanced, benefiting from higher-order Ambisonics (HOA) technology matured over the years. It offers a flexible rendering of the sound field and is widely used in interactive audio and electroacoustic music applications. The recently standardized MPEG-H 3D audio supports all of the CBA, OBA and SBA formats, allowing efficient storage and transmission of a large number of audio signals.Below is my collection of some of the AES papers from the past 10 years and other useful materials to help you catch up with the state-of-the-art of research and development in spatial audio.
Audio Topic
Spatial Audio
Perception of Height
- Vertical Stereophonic Localization in the Presence of Interchannel Crosstalk: the Analysis of Frequency-Dependent Localization Thresholds
- Sound Source and Loudspeaker Base Angle Dependency of Phantom Image Elevation Effect
- The Perception of Auditory Height in Individualised and Non-Individualized Dynamic Cross-Talk Cancellation
- Perceptual Band Allocation (PBA) for the Rendering of Vertical Image Spread with a Vertical 2D Loudspeaker Array
- Height Loudspeaker Position and Its Influence on Listeners’ Hedonic Responses
- Listener Discrimination Between Common Speaker-Based 3D Audio Reproduction Formats
3D Audio Recording
- Effect of Vertical Microphone Layer Spacing for a 3D Microphone Array
- Microphone Array Impulse Response (MAIR) Library for Spatial Audio Research
- Development and Application of a Stereophonic Multichannel Recording Technique for 3D Audio and VR
- Subjective Evaluation of Orchestral Music Recording Techniques for Three-Dimensional Audio
- Natural Sound Recording of an Orchestra with Three-Dimensional Sound
- Robust 3D Sound Capturing with Planar Microphone Arrays Using Directional Audio Coding
3D Audio Processing
- Blind Upmixing for Height and Wide Channels Based on an Image Source Method
- Perceptually Motivated 3D Diffuse Field Upmixing
- The Upmix Method for 22.2 Multichannel Sound Using Phase Randomized Impulse Responses
- Low-Complexity Stereo Signal Decomposition and Source Separation for Application in Stereo to 3D Upmixing
- Subjective Evaluation of Multichannel Upmix Method Based on Interchannel Coherent Component Extraction
- Virtual Hemispherical Amplitude Panning (VHAP): A Method for 3D Panning without Elevated Loudspeakers
Object Based Audio
- Object-Based Reverberation for Spatial Audio
- An Object-Based Audio System for Interactive Broadcasting
- Elicitation of Expert Knowledge to Inform Object-Based Audio Rendering to Different Systems
Higher-Order Ambisonics and Wave Field Synthesis
- All-Round Ambisonic Panning and Decoding
- A Fifty-Node Lebedev Grid And Its Applications To Ambisonics
- AmbiFreeVerb 2 — Development of a 3D Ambisonic Reverb with Spatial Warping and Variable Scattering
- Local Wave Field Synthesis by Spatial Band-Limitation in the Circular/Spherical Harmonics Domain
- Listener Preference for Wave Field Synthesis, Stereophony, and Different Mixes in Popular Music
- A Comparison of Wave Field Synthesis and Higher-Order Ambisonics with Respect to Physical Properties and Spatial Sampling
3D Audio Coding
- Spatial Sound Reproduction with Directional Audio Coding
- MPEG-H Audio — The New Standard for Universal Spatial/3D Audio Coding
- AC-4 — The Next Generation Audio Codec Systems
Feature Articles
Books
- Immersive Sound: The Art and Science of Binaural and Multi-Channel Audio – Edited by Agnieszka Roginska and Paul Geluso
- Spatial Audio – Francis Rumsey
Presentations
- Psychoacoustics of 3D Sound Recording: Research and Practice
- Analytical Methods of Sound Field Synthesis: Theory and Applications
- Standardization of multi-channel audio with IEC, ITU-R SMPTE and ARIB
Databases and Tools
- Microphone Array Impulse Responses (MAIR) Library and Renderer
- SADIE Ambisonics Decoders
- Ambisonics Decoder Toolbox
- AmbiX Plugin Suite
- IEM Plugin Suite
- Spatial Audio Real-Time Applications (SPARTA)
Recommendations
- January 2018: Sound Quality Prediction, Jon Francombe
- February 2018: Loudness, Thomas Lund
- March 2018: Headphones, Patrick Hegarty
- April 2018: Archiving, Restoration and Digital Libraries, Nadja Wallaszkovits
- May 2018: Audio for Virtual and Augmented Reality, Gavin Kearney
- June 2018: Hearing and Hearing Loss Prevention, Jon Boley
Curator
Hyunkook Lee
Hyunkook Lee is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Music Technology and the leader of the Applied Psychoacoustics Lab (APL) at the University of Huddersfield, UK. His research mainly focuses on the perception, capturing and rendering of spatial audio. He is also an experienced recording engineer. From 2006 to 2010, he was Senior Research Engineer in Audio R&D at LG Electronics, South Korea. He received a BMus (Hons) degree in music and sound recording (Tonmeister) in 2002, and a PhD degree in sound recording and psychoacoustics in 2006, both from the University of Surrey, UK.
AES Technical Committee Spatial Audio
- Chair: Sascha Spors
- Chair: Nils Peters
This committee addresses fundamental production and reproduction issues of multichannel audio systems employing loudspeakers, as well as binaural techniques for creating multidirectional illusions through headphones and loudspeakers.