3D-Audio. Sampling, encoding and reproduction of spatial audio

• Grant number: 17/08120-6
• Support type: Research Grants - Young Investigators Grants
• Duration: November 01, 2018 - April 30, 2023
• Field of knowledge: Engineering - Electrical Engineering
• Principal researcher: Bruno Sanches Masiero
• Grantee: Bruno Sanches Masiero
• Home Institution: Faculdade de Engenharia Elétrica e de Computação (FEEC). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Associated grant(s): 21/07475-0 - Multi-user equipment approved in grant 2017/08120-6: Listening Room, AP.EMU
• Associated scholarship(s): 21/06916-3 - Loudspeaker equalization, BP.IC; 21/07201-8 - Development of a low-cost tracking system, BP.IC; 20/16363-9 - Audio dereverberation using binary masks, BP.MS; + associated scholarships 20/10195-7 - Individualized equalization of supraaural headphones, BP.IC; 19/22795-1 - Sound object separation based on the principle of sparsity, BP.DD; 19/22945-3 - 3D audio: spatial audio acquisition, coding, and reproduction, BP.MS; 18/26531-6 - Study of sparsity-promoting regularization for superdirectional microphone with spherical geometry, BP.MS - associated scholarships

Abstract

The technological advances of the last decades have resulted in a significant change in rhe way we relate ourelves with the media. The popularization of the Internet has allowed an enormous amount of audio files to be available at any time and from virtually anywhere, a fact that has only been achieved thanks to the coding techniques that allow the compression of audio files, with MP3 as the main symbol of this process. On the other hand, the increasing popularization of both surround systems for home use and earphones associated with portable smartphones with large processing capacity allows the consolidation of spatial information as an integral element of the phonographic process and product. This suggest, on the one hand, that it is necessary to develop coding techniques designed specifically for spatial audio files, with spatial audio object coding (SAOC) being the most promising of these techniques. On the other hand, it is necessary to update the spatial audio capture and playback techniques to meet the new requirements imposed by SAOC. In this project, we intend to work in the interfaces of spatial recording and reproduction, and expect as results new algorithms for sourse separation, a metric for evaluation of the degree of immersion attained by different reproduction systems and hardware prototypes to be used with the SAOC-based audio chain. Concomitantly, this project will assist in the creation of a research group in \emph{Communication Acoustics}, a new area within a traditional research institution, as is the case of the Faculty for Electrical and Computer Engineering at Unicamp. (AU)