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

Matching early reflections of simulated and measured RIRs by applying sound-source directivity filters

Anthony Gallien, Karolina Prawda, Sebastian J. Schlecht 2024 4th International Conference on Acoustics and Sound Reinforcement, ASR 2024

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

Toward a Standard Listener-Independent HRTF to Facilitate Long-Term Adaptation

Pedro Llado Gonzalez, Katharina Pollack, Nils Meyer-Kahlen 2024 Journal of the Audio Engineering Society

Directional distribution of the pseudo intensity vector in anisotropic late reverberation

Nils Meyer-Kahlen, Sebastian J. Schlecht 2024 Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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

Puukuidun hienorakenteen vaikutus vaahtorainattujen äänenvaimennusmateriaalien akustisiin ominaisuuksiin

Jose Cucharero Moya, Kari Kammiovirta, Tapio Lokki, Tuomas Hänninen 2023 Akustiikkapäivät 2023: Artikkelit

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

Optimizing Higher-Order Directional Audio Coding with Adaptive Mixing and Energy Matching for Ambisonic Compression and Upmixing

Christoph Hold, Leo McCormack, Archontis Politis, Ville Pulkki 2023 Proceedings of the 2023 IEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics, WASPAA 2023

Repeated knockout tournaments for efficient screening of the top-ranking sample

Petteri Hyvärinen, Nils Meyer-Kahlen 2023 Audio Engineering Society Convention 155
More information on our research in the Aalto research portal.
Research portal
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