Perceptual Properties of Local Sound Field Synthesis

• Applicant: Professor Dr.-Ing. Sascha Spors
• Subject Area: Acoustics
• Term: from 2017 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 326746201

• Final Report Year: 2021

Final Report Abstract

Local sound field synthesis approaches, as compared to traditional sound field synthesis, feature an increased physical accuracy within a local listening area. This project investigated if this increase in physical accuracy leads to an improved quality of such approaches. With the help of binaural synthesis, selected (local) sound field synthesis approaches were assessed within listening experiments targeting their spatial and timbral fidelity. The results show that local sound field synthesis performs at least as good as conventional methods for azimuthal sound source localisation. A significant increase of timbral fidelity is achieved with distinct parametrisations of the local sound field synthesis approaches. As timbral fidelity is considered to have a major impact on the overall quality of spatial sound reproduction, well designed local sound field synthesis seems to feature an increased quality compared to traditional approaches. In order to predict the physical and perceptual properties of (local) sound field synthesis, a geometric model was developed that predicts spatial aliasing artefacts caused by the spatial discretisation of the deployed loudspeaker arrays. The novel model turned out to be quite versatile in such that it can predict the occurrence of spatial aliasing for arbitrary convex loudspeaker arrays as a function of the listening position and the desired sound field. The relation between colouration and the output of the model was established as a proof of concept.

Publications

• Colouration in 2.5D Local Sound Field Synthesis using Spatial Bandwidt-Limitation. In: IEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics. New Paltz, USA, October 2017, 160-164
  Winter, Fiete ; Hold, Christoph ; Wierstorf, Hagen ; Raake, Alexander ; Spors, Sascha
  
• Improvement of the reporting method for closed-loop human localization experiments. In: 142nd Convention of the Audio Engineering Society, 2017
  Fiete, Winter ; Wierstorf, Hagen ; Spors, Sascha
  
• Colouration in Local Wave Field Synthesis. In: IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing 26 (2018), October, Nr. 10, S. 1913–1924
  Winter, Fiete ; Wierstorf, Hagen ; Hold, Christoph ; Krüger, Frank ; Raake, Alexander ; Spors, Sascha
  
• A Geometric Model for Prediction of Spatial Aliasing in 2.5D Sound Field Synthesis. In: IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing 27 (2019), June, Nr. 6, S. 1031–1046
  Winter, Fiete ; Schultz, Frank ; Firtha, Gergely ; Spors, Sascha
  
• Local Sound Field Synthesis, Universität Rostock, Diss., 2019
  Winter, Fiete