Department of Signal Processing and Acoustics

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.  

Group members

Latest publications

Acoustic Properties of Aerogels: Current Status and Prospects

Tatiana Budtova, Tapio Lokki, Sadeq Malakooti, Ameya Rege, Hongbing Lu, Barbara Milow, Jaana Vapaavuori, Stephanie Vivod 2023 Advanced Engineering Materials

Interpolation of Spatial Room Impulse Responses Using Partial Optimal Transport

Aaron Geldert, Nils Meyer-Kahlen, Sebastian J. Schlecht 2023 ICASSP 2023 - 2023 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP)

Magnitude-Least-Squares Binaural Ambisonic Rendering with Phase Continuation

Christoph Hold, Nils Meyer-Kahlen, Ville Pulkki 2023

Chamber music hall acoustics: Measurements and perceptual differences

Winfried Lachenmayr, Nils Meyer-Kahlen, Otavio Colella Gomes, Antti Kuusinen, Tapio Lokki 2023 The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

Direction specific ambisonics source separation with end-to-end deep learning

Francesc Lluís, Nils Meyer-Kahlen, Vasileios Chatziioannou, Alex Hofmann 2023 Acta Acustica

Spatial Reconstruction-Based Rendering of Microphone Array Room Impulse Responses

Leo McCormack, Nils Meyer-Kahlen, Archontis Politis 2023 AES: Journal of the Audio Engineering Society

Auralization of Measured Room Transitions in Virtual Reality

Thomas McKenzie, Nils Meyer-Kahlen, Christoph Hold, Sebastian J. Schlecht, Ville Pulkki 2023 AES: Journal of the Audio Engineering Society

Verification on Head-Related Transfer Functions of a Snowman Model Simulated Using the Finite-Difference Time-Domain Method

Julie Meyer, Sebastian Prepelita, Ali Khajeh-Saeed, Michael Smirnov, Pablo Hoffmann 2023 IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio Speech and Language Processing

Inside The Quartet-A first-person virtual reality string quartet production

Nils Meyer-Kahlen, Petra Piiroinen, Gautam Vishwanath, Petri Juntunen, Eero Tiainen, Sebastian Schlecht 2023 Proceedings of the Audio Engineering Society Convention 154
More information on our research in the Research database.
Research database
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