Department of Information and Communications Engineering

Virtual Acoustics

The Virtual Acoustics Research Group is concentrating on room acoustics – how it could be measured, simulated, and auralized as well as how humans perceive different rooms, in particular the team is world-know on the research of concert halls.
virtual acoustics research group doing measurements in a concert hall

The aim of the Virtual Acoustics group is to get an encompassing understanding how rooms modify sound that we hear. To pursue this goal, the group is investigating auralization, spatial sound capturing and reproduction, binaural technology, and novel objective and subjective evaluation methods, as well as physically-based room acoustics modeling methods. Particularly, the interest has been in concert halls, in which the group has developed new measurement techniques, analysis methods for spatial impulse responses, and sensory evaluation methods to understand the perceptual differences between concert halls. 

The current research topics are:

  • 3D-sound capturing and reproduction (both with microphone arrays and within room acoustics simulations)
  • sound in virtual/augmented reality applications
  • perception of speech in noise and reverberation
  • acoustics of chamber music halls
  • acoustics of cinemas and studios
  • novel bio-based absorption materials

The Virtual Acoustics Research Group belongs to the Aalto Acoustics Lab. The research group is led by Professor Tapio Lokki, AES Fellow.  

Latest publications

Active acoustic enhancement systems: A review

Will J. Cassidy, Gian Marco De Bortoli, Karolina Prawda, Philip Coleman, Russell Mason, Tapio Lokki, Sebastian J. Schlecht, Enzo De Sena 2026 Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

OK5: Spatial Room Impulse Responses from 25 Spaces in our Work Environment

Sergio de las Heras, Nils Meyer-Kahlen, Tapio Lokki, Johannes M. Arend 2026 Proc. of the 52nd DAGA, Dresden, Germany

Sound absorption of foam-formed softwood fibers: Characterization, modeling, prediction

Janis Heldmann, Jose Cucharero, Tapio Lokki 2026 Applied Acoustics

Solving room impulse response inverse problems using flow matching with analytic Wiener denoiser

Kyung Yun Lee, Nils Meyer-Kahlen, Sebastian J. Schlecht, Vesa Välimäki 2026 Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

Audiovisual Coherence Thresholds for Direct-to-Reverberant Energy Ratio

Peter Lindahl, Johannes M. Arend, Nils Meyer-Kahlen 2026 Proceedings of the AES International Conference on Audio for Virtual and Augmented Reality and Immersive Games, Paris, France

On the role of speech similarity in the detection of room acoustic differences

Thomas McKenzie, Nils Meyer-Kahlen, Sebastian J. Schlecht 2026 Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

Phase-Scaling Effects Using Giant FFT

Vesa Välimäki, Roope Salmi, Stefan Bilbao, Sebastian J. Schlecht, David Zicarelli, Joshua Kit Clayton 2026 AES: Journal of the Audio Engineering Society

Open Educational Resources for Acoustics and Audio Signal Processing Using Jupyter Notebooks and Pyfar

Fabian Brinkmann, Marco Berzborn, Anne Heimes, Anton Hoyer, Xenofon Karakonstantis, Simon Kersten, Tim Lübeck, Pascal Palenda, Cristobal Andrade, J. M. Arend, Nara Hahn, Tobias Jüterbock, Nils Meyer-Kahlen, Artur Paskiewicz, Sebastian J. Schlecht, Frank Schultz, Stefan Weinzierl 2025 Proceedings of Forum Acusticum/Euronoise 2025

Audibility of reduced spatial resolution in musical instrument directivity

Andrea Corcuera-Marruffo, Nils Meyer-Kahlen, Tapio Lokki 2025 Acta Acustica
More information on our research in the Aalto research portal.
Research portal
  • Updated:
  • Published:
Share
URL copied!