PhDThis thesis explores how audio can be better incorporated into how people access
information and does so by developing approaches for creating three-dimensional audio
environments with low processing demands. This is done by investigating three research
questions.
Mobile applications have processor and memory requirements that restrict the
number of concurrent static or moving sound sources that can be rendered with binaural
audio. Is there a more e cient approach that is as perceptually accurate as the traditional
method? This thesis concludes that virtual Ambisonics is an ef cient and accurate means
to render a binaural auditory display consisting of noise signals placed on the horizontal
plane without head tracking. Virtual Ambisonics is then more e cient than convolution
of HRTFs if more than two sound sources are concurrently rendered or if movement of
the sources or head tracking is implemented.
Complex acoustics models require signi cant amounts of memory and processing. If
the memory and processor loads for a model are too large for a particular device, that
model cannot be interactive in real-time. What steps can be taken to allow a complex
room model to be interactive by using less memory and decreasing the computational
load? This thesis presents a new reverberation model based on hybrid reverberation
which uses a collection of B-format IRs. A new metric for determining the mixing
time of a room is developed and interpolation between early re
ections is investigated.
Though hybrid reverberation typically uses a recursive lter such as a FDN for the late
reverberation, an average late reverberation tail is instead synthesised for convolution
reverberation.
Commercial interfaces for music search and discovery use little aural information
even though the information being sought is audio. How can audio be used in
interfaces for music search and discovery? This thesis looks at 20 interfaces and
determines that several themes emerge from past interfaces. These include using a two
or three-dimensional space to explore a music collection, allowing concurrent playback of
multiple sources, and tools such as auras to control how much information is presented. A
new interface, the amblr, is developed because virtual two-dimensional spaces populated
by music have been a common approach, but not yet a perfected one. The amblr is also
interpreted as an art installation which was visited by approximately 1000 people over 5
days. The installation maps the virtual space created by the amblr to a physical space
