Conference_programme: 18: Room acoustics

Lecture: A Comparative Study of Spatial Decoding Methods for Binaural Renderings in 3D Audio

Author(s): Matthew Thomas Sanju, Newton Michael, Hamilton Brian

Summary:
This study is concerned with techniques for binaural audio reproduction through headphones from B-format impulse responses, which could be numerically simulated or recorded in the field. An experiment was conducted where head-related transfer functions of a 3D-printed dummy head were measured in an anechoic chamber, and the same dummy head was used for binaural recordings of room impulse responses at different locations in three rooms. B-format recordings were taken at the same positions using a tetrahedral microphone array, and binaural room impulse responses were created using 12 virtual loudspeakers arranged in a dodecahedral format and the measured HRTFs of the dummy head. Mapping of the B-format recordings to virtual loudspeakers was carried out using First-order Ambisonics with the ALLRAD decoder as implemented by High Order Ambisonics library from Aalto University, and using the Spatial Decomposition Method (SDM) as implemented in the SDM Matlab Toolbox (also from Aalto University). The binaural impulses responses were then convolved with dry audio and a listening test was conducted where participants were asked to judge the similarity of each B-format-based binaural rendering to those rendered using the reference dummy head recordings.\n\n

Corresponding author

Name: Dr Brian Hamilton

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Country: United Kingdom