A system for the auralisation of synthetic sound scenes using headphones and head-tracking

Auralisation is the process of rendering virtual sound fields. It is used in areas including: acoustic design, defence, gaming and audio research. As part of a PhD project concerned with the influence of loudspeaker directivity on the perception of reproduced sound, a fully-computed auralisation system has been developed. For this, acoustic modelling software is used to synthesise and extract binaural impulse responses of virtual rooms. The resulting audio is played over headphones and allows listeners to experience the excerpt being reproduced within the synthesised environment. The main advance with this system is that impulse responses are calculated for a number of head positions, which allows the listeners to move when listening to the recreated sounds. This allows for a much more realistic simulation, and makes it especially useful for conducting subjective experiments on sound reproduction systems and/or acoustical environments which are either not available or are even impractical to create. Hence, it greatly increases the range and type of experiments that can be undertaken at Surrey. The main components of the system are described, together with the results from a validation experiment which demonstrate that this system provides similar results to experiments conducted previously using loudspeakers in an anechoic chamber