Synthesising Moving Sounds

Abstract

Auditory display designers are making increasingly effective and creative use of our ability to localise sound; to particular auditory events as occurring at particular locations. Many applications in which spatial audio has been applied could also benefit from exploiting another important ability of the auditory system; the detection and identification of sound source motion. The display of moving sources could improve usability, provide additional variables in sonification, make virtual environments more perceptually realistic and provide new creative possibilities for designers. Transaural cancellation allows the creation of spatial audio with just two loudspeakers. These techniques are now extended to create the illusion of a sound source moving along an arbitrary trajectory at an arbitrary rate.

This paper discusses the application of synthesised sound source movement to a number of practical applications in auditory display. We seek to extend the use of Head-Related Transfer Functions (HRTFs) in stationary sound spatialisation to encompass movement synthesis. The detection of moving sources is not time-invariant so we propose and demonstrate the use of time-frequency spectrograms as a mechanism for characterising source movement. There are an infinite number of such trajectory-related spectrograms and we address the need for a continuous directional model to accommodate this.

Conference

Publication date: November 1998

Publication date (Print): November 1998

Pages: 1-10

Affiliations

School of Computer Science, Cybernetics and Electronic Engineering, University of Reading

Reading, United Kingdom

Article

DOI: 10.14236/ewic/AD1998.12

Copyright statement: © Michael J. Evans. Published by BCS Learning and Development Ltd. International Conference on Auditory Display '98, University of Glasgow, UK

License:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Conference name: International Conference on Auditory Display '98

Conference acronym: AD

Conference number:

Conference location: University of Glasgow, UK

Conference date: 1-4 November 1998

Conference sponsor: Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC)

Conference theme: Auditory Display

Product

Product Information: 1477-9358BCS Learning & Development

Self URI (article page): https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14236/ewic/AD1998.12

Self URI (journal page): https://ewic.bcs.org/

Categories

Series title: Electronic Workshops in Computing