Virtual Acoustics for Immersive Audio

Virtual acoustics is the simulation of sound propagation in a virtual or real environment, involving technologies to model how sound travels, reflects, and interacts with the space. It is essential for creating immersive and convincing audio-visual experiences in extended reality (XR). This course will cover the fundamentals of spatial audio technology, with an emphasis on recreating virtual acoustics for AR and VR. The first part of the course will cover reverberation, which models the propagation of sound from a source placed in the environment to the listener, and the complex interactions of the sound waves with the environment. The second part of the course will focus on spatialisation, which is how sound is localised in space. We will discuss rendering out-loud through multiple loudspeakers and binaurally through headphones. There will be theory lectures and hands-on learning with lab assignments (in Python) and demos which will make use of CCRMA’s 3D listening room.

Gloria Dal Santo received the M.Sc. degree in electrical and electronic engineering from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland in 2022. She is currently working toward the Doctoral degree with the Acoustics Lab, Aalto University, Espoo, Finland. Her research interests include artificial reverberation and audio applications of machine learning.

Orchisama Das is a postdoctoral researcher at King’s College London. Prior to this, she was a Senior Audio Research Scientist at Sonos, and a Research Fellow at the Institute of Sound Recording at University of Surrey. She received her PhD from the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford University in 2021, during which she interned at Tesla and Meta Reality Labs. Her research interests are artificial reverberation and room acoustics modeling, with a focus on real-time room acoustics rendering with delay networks.

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