Multi-user equipment approved in grant 2017/08120-6: Listening Room

Abstract

The technological advances of the last decades have resulted in a significant change in the way we relate ourselves 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 source 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)