Defence of doctoral thesis in the field of Acoustics and Audio Signal Processing, M.Sc. Benoit Alary

When a sound is produced in a room, the sound waves emanating from it will quickly bounce around all the surrounding surfaces and form what we perceive as “reverberation”. While many sound reproduction methods tend to simplify this as an omnidirectional phenomenon, the shape and content of a room may lead to a reverberation that is not perceived as uniform in all directions. Understanding the impact of direction-dependent reverberation in our perception of rooms is a crucial step in building better reproduction methods, especially in the context of immersive sound in virtual and augmented reality.

In his dissertation, Benoit Alary offers a complete framework to analyze the perception of directional reverberation both objectively and subjectively, as well as new artificial reverberation algorithms capable of producing directional reverberation characteristics. The dissertation also offers novel uses for velvet noise, a special type of random noise signals, in the decorrelation of audio signals as well as artificial reverberation. The works detailed in this dissertation provide new insights in our perception of room acoustics while offering the means to auralize reverberant sound fields in mixed reality environments.

Part of the work of this dissertation was conducted in collaboration with researchers at IRCAM, in Paris, during a research visit and Benoit’s work on this topic is now continuing in a post-doctoral project founded by the Kaute Foundation, developing new methods for the conservation of the acoustics of historical halls in Finland, such as the main auditorium of the Finnish National Opera and Ballet.

Opponent: Doctor Jean-Marc Jot, iZotope, Inc., Cambridge, MA, United States

Custos: Professor Vesa Välimäki, Aalto University School of Electrical Engineering, Department of Signal Processing and Acoustics

Contact details of the doctoral candidate: [email protected], phone +358 46 953 8624

The defence will be organised via remote technology (Zoom) and on campus. Link to the event

Zoom Quick Guide

The doctoral thesis will be publicly displayed 10 days before the defence in the Aaltodoc publication archive of Aalto University.

Electronic dissertation