Interactive Reproduction of Binaurally Recorded Signals

Authors:

Nagel, S.

Ph. D. Dissertation

 

School:

IKS, RWTH Aachen

Adress:

Templergraben 55, 52056 Aachen

Series:

Aachen Series on Communication Systems

Number:

6

Date:

Jan. 2025

ISBN:

978-3-84409-758-0

Language:

English

Abstract

Binaural reproduction refers to the reproduction of audio signals at the two ears of a listener. For a moving listener to perceive sound sources as fixed in the environment, the reproduced signals need to match the listener’s movements. Generating such signals with head tracking is referred to as interactive binaural reproduction. Established methods rely on binaural synthesis and a description or dense sampling of the sound field. This thesis proposes methods to achieve interactive binaural reproduction based on binaurally recorded signals, that is, on two ear signals originally intended for non-interactive binaural reproduction for a non-moving listener.
Such methods are desirable for two major reasons. First, they enable a more immersive experience of spatial audio recorded with ear-mounted microphones or artificial heads. Second, they can be integrated into headphones. There, they seamlessly interoperate with existing media devices, apps and distribution platforms. This eliminates the coordination and standardization efforts that would be required to make state-of-the-art methods widely usable, and potentially facilitates a broad market introduction.
A listening experiment using a real-time prototype with head tracking validates the proposed approach. Acoustic scenes with speech sources were recorded with microphones at the ears of human subjects. The prototype then provided interactive reproduction of these recordings via headphones. Subjects were asked to distinguish, in an indirect comparison, the artificial headphone reproduction from reality (real loudspeakers in the room playing speech signals). Results show that this task was difficult even for expert listeners, indicating that the prototype provided a natural and plausible listening experience.

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