Karlheinz Brandenberg - Spatial Sound - HRTFs vs. Room Reverb

Custom Head Related Transfer Functions (HRTFs) are the bread-and-butter of spatial sound. From every possible direction, measure the impulse response of sound entering the ear, and then apply that user's impulse responses, via an HRTF, to incoming audio. Voila, you have spatial sound. But are these custom HRTFs necessary?

New data from Karlheinz Brandenburg suggests that matching the room reverb is more important than the user's custom HRTFs. Karlheinz Brandenburg and his colleagues will lead the discussion, illustrated with new data.  Could this be true?  What do you think?

Who:  Karlheinz Brandenburg
What: Spatial sound  - HRTFs vs. Room Reverb
When: Friday October 20th at 1:30PM  <<< Note special time
Where: CCRMA Stage, followed by a demo
Why: Sound has higher fidelity with proper spatial cues, right?

Bring your two ears to CCRMA and we'll see if we can make them happy, or at least happier.

-- Malcolm



Spatial Sound - HRTFs vs. Room Reverb
A look into the cues for plausible auditory illusions via headphones

Spatial sound via headphones has been a dream for more than 50 years. Now it seems there are finally solutions to get perfectly plausible sound reproduction via headphone. The talk will first give a glance of what has been tried before. This includes head tracking using to get the right HRTF to the ears. In recent times, a lot of effort has been put on individualized HRTFs, measured via a number of different solutions. An often-neglected cue are the actual reflection patterns in a room. With measured Room Impulse Responses and just a good average HRTF (e.g. from a Kemar HATS), plausible reproduction of sound is possible. We plan to present a demo of such a system after the talk.





Biography
Karlheinz Brandenburg received the Dipl.-Ing. and Dipl.-Math. degrees in electrical engineering and mathematics and the Dr.-Ing. degree in electrical engineering from the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität, Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany. He is currently a Senior Professor (emeritus) at Technische Universität Ilmenau, Germany and CEO of Brandenburg Labs GmbH, a startup company specializing in immersive audio technologies.

Following times as a Postdoctoral Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, U.S.A. and again Friedrich-Alexander-Universität he joined the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS, Erlangen, as head of the Audio and Multimedia Department. He is the founding director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology IDMT, Ilmenau where he retired in July, 2019. For his pioneering work in digital audio coding (as a main contributor to the mp3 and AAC audio coding standards), perceptual measurement techniques, wave field synthesis, psychoacoustics, and analysis of audio and video signals he received many awards. Among them are the IEEE Masaru Ibuka Consumer Electronics Award, the German Future Award (shared with his colleagues), and the Audio Engineering Society Silver Medal Award. Furthermore, he is a member of the Hall of Fame of the Internet Society and the IEEE Consumer Electronics Association.