Statistical validation of applying the Ambisonics system in room acoustics.

Abstract

During the recent decades, several studies have been conducted in order to contribute to the knowledge of acoustic cues in auditoria. Different protocols have been established and a range of findings have been published. However, we do not find a sufficient number of works that look at the relationship between objective and subjective cues for each of the techniques used. It is imperative to understand these relationships before using some protocol to draw general conclusions on room acoustics. In my doctoral thesis, we used a particular technique (Ambisonics first order) that had not yet been validated for applications in room acoustics. We built an objective database with impulse responses measured in 16 concert halls of Paris and a subjective database with the application of these impulses responses in hearing tests in a special chamber installed at the Laboratoire d'Acoustique Musicale, at University Paris VI. The result of this work was an enormous amount of data that should be statistically analyzed over the coming years. The proposed postdoctoral work consists of applying statistical and signal processing techniques in order to develop the research on the corpus already obtained. Some statistical analysis initially carried in the doctoral program have confirmed that the Ambisonics system is particularly well suited to applications in room acoustics and showed results that could contribute substantially to scientific progress in this area.