Surround by Sound: A Review of Spatial Audio Recording and Reproduction

In this article, a systematic overview of various recording and reproduction techniques for spatial audio is presented. While binaural recording and rendering is designed to resemble the human two-ear auditory system and reproduce sounds specifically for a listener’s two ears, soundfield recording and reproduction using a large number of microphones and loudspeakers replicate an acoustic scene within a region. These two fundamentally different types of techniques are discussed in the paper. A recent popular area, multi-zone reproduction, is also briefly reviewed in the paper. The paper is concluded with a discussion of the current state of the field and open problemsThe authors acknowledge National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) No. 61671380 and Australian Research Council Discovery Scheme DE 150100363

FAST CONTINUOUS HRTF ACQUISITION WITH UNCONSTRAINED MOVEMENTS OF HUMAN SUBJECTS

ABSTRACT Head related transfer function (HRTF) is widely used in 3D audio reproduction, especially over headphones. Conventionally, HRTF database is acquired at discrete directions and the acquisition process is time-consuming. Recent works have been proposed to improve HRTF acquisition efficiency via continuous acquisition. However, these HRTF acquisition techniques still require subject to sit still (with limited head movement) in a rotating chair. In this paper, we further relax the head movement constraint during acquisition by using a head tracker. The proposed continuous HRTF acquisition technique relies on the activation based normalized least-mean-square (ANLMS) algorithm to extract HRTF on the fly. Experimental results validated the accuracy of the proposed technique, when compared with the standard static acquisition technique