Personalization of the 3D audio experience

3D-audio makes it appear as if sounds come from outside of your head, even better the sounds can come from everywhere: from above or below, from the front of the back. 3D-audio really immerses you into a soundscape: you become part of it, thereby improving the experience significantly. However, for the last couple of years the audio-visual sector has been struggling with a specific problem that stands in the way of the broad application of 3D-audio delivered through headphones: the sound processing involved has to be personalized. Recently, we developed at the UA a low-cost method to measure the Head-Related Transfer Function (HRTF) that allows such personalization. The main goal of this project is to turn the lab-version of this HRTF measurement method into a more robust and user-friendly method that can be applied outside the laboratory and for which we can prove the effectivity/usefulness to third parties using custom-built demonstrator applications. This will allow us to fulfill the prerequisites for commercializing our HRTF measurement technology through a spin-off.

Keywords:SOUND DESIGN

Disciplines:Audio and speech computing

Project type:Collaboration project