Capture, Analysis and Reproduction of Spatial Sound for Everyday Audio Applications

Spatial audio processing is the processing of real or imagined three dimensional sound environments including perceived spatial information such as the location of objects and the spatial qualities of room acoustics. Spatial audio is often useful in entertainment, assisted hearing, virtual/augmented reality (VR/AR) applications, defense applications, and noise cancellation etc.

Humans, and other animals, have evolved sophisticated spatial hearing capabilities in order to sense useful information about the environment. Spatial sound technologies not only enable the recreation of three dimensional sound fields for human consumption, but also give human like hearing capabilities to audio devices embedded with microphones and loudspeakers. This talk focuses on successful technologies that combine the knowledge of physical acoustics, advance designs of microphone/loudspeaker arrays, and recently developed sound processing theories for spatial audio capture, analysis and reproduction. The future of spatial audio will also be discussed with examples from everyday audio applications.

Biography

Dr Prasanga N. Samarasinghe received her B.E. degree (with first-class honors) in Electronic and Electrical Engineering from the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka, in 2009. She completed her Ph.D. degree at the Australian National University, Canberra in 2015, including a 5 months long Research Engineer Internship at Dolby Laboratories - Australia. Currently, (since 2015), she is a Research Fellow in the Audio & Acoustics group in the Research School of Engineering at the Australian National University. Her research interests include spatial audio, room acoustics, active noise control, and multi-channel signal processing.