FOR 1557:  Simulation and Evaluation of Acoustical Environments (SEACEN)

• Subject Area: Mechanical and Industrial Engineering
• Term: from 2011 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 174776315

The design and the generation of virtual acoustic realities has become a central field of research, both as a basis for proprietary applications in media technology and virtual reality and as a research tool for other disciplines related to the generation, transmission, reproduction and perception of sound. The Research Unit offers a coordinated effort to improve the complete signal chain from the numerical modelling, the data acquisition within numerical or real sound fields, the coding and transmission to the electro-acoustic reproduction by binaural technology or by sound field synthesis.
The Research Unit will establish a unified data platform and a uniform pool of methods for perceptual quality assessment of virtual environments and the perceptual verification of improvements in signal processing. A novel approach for the comparative evaluation of simulated environments will not only perceptively validate all improvements along the signal chain, it will also allow evaluating the plausibility and/or the authenticity of virtual acoustic environments as a whole. Moreover, it will be used to bring forth better physical measures to predict the qualities of natural acoustic environments as well.
The Research Unit is coordinated by Prof. Stefan Weinzierl (TU Berlin, Audio Communication Group, speaker) and Prof. Michael Vorländer (RWTH Aachen, Institute of Technical Acoustics).

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• International Connection: Israel

Projects

• Audio-visual perception of acoustical environments (Applicant Maempel, Hans-Joachim )
• Determination of boundary conditions by inverse modeling of room acoustics (Applicant Vorländer, Michael )
• Determination of the measurement and simulation uncertainty of room acoustic quantities (Applicant Vorländer, Michael )
• Evaluation of virtual acoustic environments (Applicant Weinzierl, Stefan )
• Koordinationsprojekt (Applicant Weinzierl, Stefan )
• Measurement, processing and modeling of natural acoustic environments (Applicant Rafaely, Boaz )
• Models of room acoustical perception (Applicant van de Par, Steven )
• Psychoacoustic analysis and spatial coding of microphone array signals (Applicant Brandenburg, Karlheinz )
• Room Acoustics Modelling (Applicant Vorländer, Michael )
• Signal Processing for Reproduction of Room Acoustics (Applicant Spors, Sascha )

• Spokesperson: Professor Dr. Stefan Weinzierl