3D Sound

This research is based on the Binaural rendering from Surround sound. As Binaural and Surround systems are becoming more accurate and able to give a fully-immersive perception of sound through headphones, the importance of understanding how these systems work is necessary to better use, develop, and implement Binaural in the everyday routine. Binaural, its history, features and limitations has been analysed. Surround systems, such as 5.1 and Ambisonics, have been analysed and compared for Binaural Rendering purposes. Ambisonics has shown that its versatility and 360 degrees spatial audio characteristics can be used to accurately render Binaural signals.

Nowadays, interaction represents an attractive approach for deploying new forms of entertainment and art. Towards this aim, novel technologies can make possible advanced concepts of interaction, hence supporting complicated application scenarios. In this work, an interactive audiovisual installation is presented, which aims to make the participant interact with the stars in the space. Human gesture based interaction is employed in order to control the visual and audio reproduction in real time.

This paper describes large scale implementations of spatial
audio systems which focus on the presentation of simplified
spatial cues that appeal to auditory spatial perception. It
reports a series of successful implementations of nested and
multiple spatial audio fields to provide listeners with
opportunities to explore complex sound fields, to receives
cues pertaining to source behaviors within complex audio
environments. This included systems designed as public
sculptures capable of presenting engaging sound fields for
ambulant listeners. The paper also considers questions of
sound field perception and reception in relation to audio
object scaling according to the dimensions of a sound
reproduction system and proposes that a series of multiple,
coordinated sound fields may provide better solutions to
large auditorial surround sound than traditional reproduction
fields which surround the audience. Particular attention is
paid to the experiences since 2008 with the multi-spatial The
Morning Line sound system, which has been exhibited as a
public sculpture in a number of European cities.

The generation of virtual auditory space (VAS) requires that the sound presented, say over headphones, is filtered in a manner that replicates the normal filtering of the external auditory periphery (the "outer ears"). The sound pressure transformation from a point in space to the eardrum is referred to as the Head Related Transfer Function (HRTF). HRTFs are measures at discrete points in space, while space itself is continuous. We describe the acoustic and psychophysical errors associated with a method of HRTF interpolation that employs a spherical thin-plate spline. Errors in the reconstructed HRTFs were dependant on the number of the locations in the interpolation set and increased markedly for interpolation sets with less than 150 locations (sparse sets). Auditory localization performance began to deteriorate for interpolation sets with less than 150 locations and the localization errors principally followed the cone of confusion. These results indicate that high fidelity continuous VAS can be generated from HRTFs recorded at as few as 150 discrete locations.

In Gravity (2013), Alfonso Cuarón introduced a fully three-dimensional sound design approach that was originally termed by Idrovo and Pauletto (2019) as ‘immersive point-of-audition’. More recently, in Netflix’s Roma (2018), Cuarón not only perfected such treatment of sound, but consolidated an audio-visual style that stands out for its capacity to enhance our sensation of ‘presence’ in the narrative world, a style that is referred here to as immersive continuity. Grounded on the spatiotemporal continuity of the long take, Cuarón’s immersive continuity allows sound objects to flow all around the 3-D space, and hence opens a giant window of opportunity for the exploitation of Dolby Atmos. Through an extensive analysis of Roma, this article describes the aesthetics of such audio-visual style, and beyond, it explores the methods and workflows that permitted Cuarón’s sound team to fully exploit sound three-dimensionality. Finally, I discuss the growing adoption of Netflix as one of the major challenges that the theatrical cinema industry has to face; and argue that embracing immersive continuity may be a powerful weapon for attracting audiences to a cinematic experience that cannot be found at home.