Abstract
This paper reports the recent works and progress on a PC and C++ language-based virtual auditory environment (VAE) system platform. By tracing the temporary location and orientation of listener’s head and dynamically simulating the acoustic propagation from sound source to two ears, the system is capable of recreating free-field virtual sources at various directions and distances as well as auditory perception in reflective environment via headphone presentation. Schemes for improving VAE performance, including PCA-based (principal components analysis) near-field virtual source synthesis, simulating six degrees of freedom of head movement, are proposed. Especially, the PCA-based scheme greatly reduces the computational cost of multiple virtual sources synthesis. Test demonstrates that the system exhibits improved performances as compared with some existing systems. It is able to simultaneously render up to 280 virtual sources using conventional scheme, and 4500 virtual sources using the PCA-based scheme. A set of psychoacoustic experiments also validate the performance of the system, and at the same time, provide some preliminary results on the research of binaural hearing. The functions of the VAE system is being extended and the system serves as a flexible and powerful platform for future binaural hearing researches and virtual reality applications.
Highlights
This paper reports the recent works and progress on a PC and C++ language-based virtual auditory environment (VAE) system platform
If each head-related impulse responses (HRIRs) convolution is implemented by a N-point FIR filter, excluding the scaling factors accounting for distance attenuation, 2MN multiplications and 2(MN-1) additional manipulations are required for obtaining each output sample of the binaural signals
Interpolations are only applied to 2Q principal components analysis (PCA)-weights wq,α(r,θ, ) in PCA-based virtual source synthesis given in eq (7) because the directional dependence of HRIRs are completely captured by the weights
Summary
VAE is adopted in our systems, which consists of three parts. (i) Information input and definition. This part inputs prior information and data for VAE via a user interface. These information and data are classified into three categories, the information of sources, environment and listener. The information of sources includes type of sources stimuli, the number, spatial locations, orientation and directivities (radiation pattern) and level of sources, or predetermined trajectory for a moving source. The information of listener includes the initial spatial location, orientation and individual features of listener. According to prior information and data in part (i), this part simulates both direct and reflecting transmission from sound sources to two ears using certain physical algorithms. The resultant binaural signals are reproduced via headphone after headphone-to-ear-canal transmission equalized
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