Department of Information and Communications Engineering

Communication acoustics: spatial sound and psychoacoustics

Capturing, transmission, reproduction, synthesis, and perception of sound - these are the fields that interest us in the communication acoustics team
Aalto University / Communication acoustics / photo: Ville Pulkki

Our projects are gathered around spatial sound. We have developed, and are still developing, new reproduction methods for spatial sound taking into account the time-frequency-space resolution of the human hearing. These methods are applicable to multi-channel loudspeaker layouts, headphones, and binaural hearing aids. Additionally, we are currently developing new types of non-linear beam-forming algorithms.

To enable the research of perceptually optimised spatial audio methods, we have to know more about the perceptual spatial hearing mechanisms of humans. We study these mechanisms with listening tests and model the brain mechanism devoted to spatial auditory perception. In this context, we are very interested in the perception of spatially complex sound scenes and the binaural perception of timbre.

Furthermore, we research acoustical measurement techniques for spatial sound. Here, the head-related acoustics are of vital importance in spatial hearing research, and we work on new modelling and measurement tools to understand the acoustical effects near the head and in the ear canals.

For this purpose, we must also inspect proper acoustical sources in measurements. Our current topic is the suitability of laser-induced shock waves as massless point sources. They can be applied to acoustical room measurements, and the technique is currently in active development.

European Union flag

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement no 240453. The starting independent research project Technologies and Psychophysics of Spatial Sound (TEPESS) funded by European Research Council runs within the Communication acoustics team.

Latest publications

Investigating sound-field reproduction methods as perceived by bilateral hearing aid users and normal-hearing listeners

Janani Fernandez, Leo McCormack, Petteri Hyvärinen, Abigail Anne Kressner 2024 Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

Dynamic late reverberation rendering using the common-slope model

Georg Götz, Teodors Kerimovs, Sebastian J. Schlecht, Ville Pulkki 2024 2024 6th International Conference on Audio for Games

Compression of Higher-Order Ambisonic Signals using Directional Audio Coding

Christoph Hold, Ville Pulkki, Archontis Politis, Leo McCormack 2024 IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio Speech and Language Processing

Perceptually-Motivated Spatial Audio Codec for Higher-Order Ambisonics Compression

Christoph Hold, Leo McCormack, Archontis Politis, Ville Pulkki 2024 ICASSP 2024 - 2024 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP)

Predicting the effect of headphones on the time to localize a target in an auditory-guided visual search task

Pedro Llado Gonzalez, Roberto Barumerli, Robert Baumgartner, Piotr Majdak 2024 Frontiers in Virtual Reality

The impact of head-worn devices in an auditory-aided visual search task

Pedro Llado Gonzalez, Petteri Hyvärinen, Ville Pulkki 2024 Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
More information on our research in the Aalto research portal.
Research portal
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