The technologies and psychoacoustics of spatial sound have been studied at Dept Signal Processing and Acoustics in Helsinki University of Technology for more than 15 years. The current streams of research are covered in the presentation. The technology studies concern the reproduction and coding of spatial sound, the acoustics of external ear and ear canal, and augmented reality audio. The studies on psychoacoustics concern the perception of spatial distribution of wide sound sources, and computational modeling of binaural perception of spatial sound. Some multichannel demonstrations will be given on Directional Audio Coding application as the audio engine for virtual worlds.
Dr Ville Pulkki has M.Sc on technical physics, and D.Sc on Acoustics from Helsinki University of Technology. He has also studied music and audio engineering at Sibelius Academy, Dept Musical Education. In his doctorate thesis (2001), he developed Vector Base Amplitude Panning technique for virtual source positioning over multichannel loudspeaker setups, and studied it with listening tests and computational auditory modeling. Later he has developed Directional Audio Coding for capturing, coding and reproduction of spatial sound, and have been working on new types of functional models of auditory brain mechanisms for binaural hearing.
