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

Matching Reverberant Speech Through Learned Acoustic Embeddings and Feedback Delay Networks

Philipp Götz, Gloria Dal Santo, Sebastian J. Schlecht, Vesa Välimäki, Emanuël A. P. Habets 2026 ICASSP 2026 - 2026 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP)

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

Janis Heldmann, Jose Cucharero, Tapio Lokki 2026 Applied Acoustics

Sound absorption of foam-formed bean hull and birch fibres

Marike Langhans, Tuomas Hänninen, Arif Onur Yürek, Jose Cucharero Moya, Tapio Lokki, Jaana Vapaavuori 2026 Bioresource Technology Reports

AnyRIR: Robust Non-Intrusive Room Impulse Response Estimation in the Wild

Kyung Yun Lee, Nils Meyer-Kahlen, Karolina Prawda, Vesa Välimäki, Sebastian J. Schlecht 2026 ICASSP 2026 - 2026 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP)

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 AES International Conference on Audio for Virtual and Augmented Reality and Immersive Games, AVARIG 2026

ABILITY TO IDENTIFY CONCERT HALL ACOUSTICS BASED ON STEREOSCOPIC 360-DEGREE VISUALS

T. Lokki, L. Qiu, N. Meyer-Kahlen 2026 12th International Conference on Auditorium Acoustics 2025

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
More information on our research in the Aalto research portal.
Research portal
  • Updated:
  • Published:
Share
URL copied!