3-D Audio for Virtual Reality

Dr Bill Gardner
Wave Arts, Inc.

Friday November 17, 2006
11:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
Fuller Labs 320

3-D audio systems for virtual reality work by recreating the sound pressures at the ears of a listener that would occur in a real listening situation. In addition to localization cues, a virtual reality audio system will also reconstruct environmental audio effects, such as distance cues, echoes, reverberation, and the Doppler pitch effect. This talk will first review sound localization and the signal processing technology behind 3-D audio systems. A key limitation of existing systems is that they use a generic, non-individualized head model to reconstruct localization cues. The talk will speculate on a method for creating individualized head responses from images of a listener's head and ears. The talk will conclude by discussing a recently developed spatial teleconferencing system that allows remote participants to converse in a virtual acoustic room using voice over IP technology.

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Bill Gardner is the founder and president of Wave Arts, a software company that produces audio plug-ins and embedded DSP technology. In 1998, Bill received a Ph.D. from the MIT Media Lab, where he researched spatial audio perception, reverberation, sound synthesis, and audio signal processing. His dissertation was on the topic of 3-D audio using loudspeakers. Prior to studying at the Media Lab, Bill was a software engineer at Kurzweil Music Systems for 7 years, and a key contributor to the K250, K1000, and K2000 synthesizers. Bill received a bachelor's degree in Computer Science from MIT in 1982. He was awarded the publications award from the AES in 1997 for a paper on low latency convolution, the enabling technology for convolutional reverbs. In 2004 he was an invited speaker at the Frontiers of Engineering Symposium at the National Academy of Engineering. Dr. Gardner is a member of the Audio Engineering Society and sits on the review board for the Journal of the AES.

Host: Rob Lindeman

Refreshments will be served.