Non-interactive and linear experiences like cinema film offer high quality surround sound audio to enhance immersion, however the listener's experience is usually fixed to a single acoustic perspective. With the rise of virtual reality, there is a demand for recording and recreating real-world experiences in a way that allows for the user to interact and move within the reproduction. Conventional sound field translation techniques take a recording and expand it into an equivalent environment of virtual sources. However, the finite sampling of a commercial higher order microphone produces an acoustic sweet-spot in the virtual reproduction. As a result, the technique remains to restrict the listener's navigable region. In this paper, we propose a method for listener translation in an acoustic reproduction that incorporates a mixture of near-field and far-field sources in a sparsely expanded virtual environment. We perceptually validate the method through a Multiple Stimulus with Hidden Reference and Anchor (MUSHRA) experiment. Compared to the planewave benchmark, the proposed method offers both improved source localizability and robustness to spectral distortions at translated positions. A cross-examination with numerical simulations demonstrated that the sparse expansion relaxes the inherent sweet-spot constraint, leading to the improved localizability for sparse environments. Additionally, the proposed method is seen to better reproduce the intensity and binaural room impulse response spectra of near-field environments, further supporting the strong perceptual results.
ARAUS: A Large-Scale Dataset and Baseline Models of Affective Responses to Augmented Urban Soundscapes
School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University (NTU)（南洋理工大学电气与电子工程学院）；Center for Music Technology, Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院音乐技术中心）；Chungnam National University（忠南大学）
Ambisonics i.e., a full-sphere surround sound, is quintessential with 360-degree visual content to provide a realistic virtual reality (VR) experience. While 360-degree visual content capture gained a tremendous boost recently, the estimation of corresponding spatial sound is still challenging due to the required sound-field microphones or information about the sound-source locations. In this paper, we introduce a novel problem of generating Ambisonics in 360-degree videos using the audio-visual cue. With this aim, firstly, a novel 360-degree audio-visual video dataset of 265 videos is introdu…
Inria Rennes - Bretagne Atlantique（法国国家信息与自动化研究所雷恩-布列塔尼大西洋中心）；Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur（印度理工学院坎普尔分校）
This paper introduces a new paradigm for sound source lo-calization referred to as virtual acoustic space traveling (VAST) and presents a first dataset designed for this purpose. Existing sound source localization methods are either based on an approximate physical model (physics-driven) or on a specific-purpose calibration set (data-driven). With VAST, the idea is to learn a mapping from audio features to desired audio properties using a massive dataset of simulated room impulse responses. This virtual dataset is designed to be maximally representative of the potential audio scenes that the c…
Evaluating Latent Space Structure in Timbre VAEs: A Comparative Study of Unsupervised, Descriptor-Conditioned, and Perceptual Feature-Conditioned Models
Department of Computer Science \& Technology, University of Cambridge\ , United Kingdom
University of North Carolina Chapel Hill（北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；University of Maryland College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校）
We introduce a novel, perceptually derived metric (P-Reverb) that relates the just-noticeable difference (JND) of the early sound field(also called early reflections) to the late sound field (known as late reflections or reverberation). Early and late reflections are crucial components of the sound field and provide multiple perceptual cues for auditory displays. We conduct two extensive user evaluations that relate the JNDs of early reflections and late reverberation in terms of the mean-free path of the environment and present a novel P-Reverb metric. Our metric is used to estimate dynamic r…
Nantes Université（南特大学）；École Centrale Nantes（南特中央理工学院）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；LS2N（南特数字科学实验室）
Sound matching algorithms seek to approximate a target waveform by parametric audio synthesis. Deep neural networks have achieved promising results in matching sustained harmonic tones. However, the task is more challenging when targets are nonstationary and inharmonic, e.g., percussion. We attribute this problem to the inadequacy of loss function. On one hand, mean square error in the parametric domain, known as "P-loss", is simple and fast but fails to accommodate the differing perceptual significance of each parameter. On the other hand, mean square error in the spectrotemporal domain, know…
Subjective evaluations are critical for assessing the perceptual realism of sounds in audio-synthesis driven technologies like augmented and virtual reality. However, they are challenging to set up, fatiguing for users, and expensive. In this work, we tackle the problem of capturing the perceptual characteristics of localizing sounds. Specifically, we propose a framework for building a general purpose quality metric to assess spatial localization differences between two binaural recordings. We model localization similarity by utilizing activation-level distances from deep networks trained for …
Sony CSL（索尼计算机科学实验室）；LTCI, Télécom Paris（巴黎电信学院LTCI）；Institut Polytechnique de Paris（巴黎理工学院）
Synthetic creation of drum sounds (e.g., in drum machines) is commonly performed using analog or digital synthesis, allowing a musician to sculpt the desired timbre modifying various parameters. Typically, such parameters control low-level features of the sound and often have no musical meaning or perceptual correspondence. With the rise of Deep Learning, data-driven processing of audio emerges as an alternative to traditional signal processing. This new paradigm allows controlling the synthesis process through learned high-level features or by conditioning a model on musically relevant inform…
Creating sound zones has been an active research field since the idea was first proposed. So far, most sound zone control methods rely on either an optimization of physical metrics such as acoustic contrast and signal distortion or a mode decomposition of the desired sound field. By using these types of methods, approximately 15 dB of acoustic contrast between the reproduced sound field in the target zone and its leakage to other zone(s) has been reported in practical set-ups, but this is typically not high enough to satisfy the people inside the zones. In this paper, we propose a sound zone c…
Johannes Kepler University（约翰·开普勒大学）；Linz Institute of Technology（林茨理工学院）
Music emotion recognition is an important task in MIR (Music Information Retrieval) research. Owing to factors like the subjective nature of the task and the variation of emotional cues between musical genres, there are still significant challenges in developing reliable and generalizable models. One important step towards better models would be to understand what a model is actually learning from the data and how the prediction for a particular input is made. In previous work, we have shown how to derive explanations of model predictions in terms of spectrogram image segments that connect to …
Hearing Like Humans? Sound Symbolism and Perceptual Alignment in Speech Language Models
Graduate Institute of Communication Engineering National Taiwan University Taipei, Taiwan；Graduate Institute of Electrical Engineering National Taiwan University Taipei, Taiwan；Artificial Intelligence Center of Research Excellence National Taiwan University Taipei, Taiwan
Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile（智利天主教大学）；Institute for Mathematical and Computational Engineering（数学与计算工程研究所）；Music Institute（音乐研究所）
The sweet spot can be interpreted as the region where acoustic sources create a spatial auditory illusion. We study the problem of maximizing this sweet spot when reproducing a desired sound wave using an array of loudspeakers. To achieve this, we introduce a theoretical framework for spatial sound perception that can be used to define a sweet spot, and we develop a method that aims to generate a sound wave that directly maximizes the sweet spot defined by a model within this framework. Our method aims to incorporate perceptual principles from the onset and is flexible: while it imposes little…
Eindhoven University of Technology（埃因霍温理工大学）；Ghent University（根特大学）
In this paper the auditory model developed by Dau et al. [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 102, 2892-2905 (1997)] was used to simulate the perceptual similarity between complex sounds. For this purpose, a central processor stage was developed and attached as a back-end module to the auditory model. As complex sounds, a set of recordings of one note played on seven different pianos was used, whose similarity has been recently measured by Osses et al. [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 146, 1024-1035 (2019)] using a 3-AFC discrimination task in noise. The auditory model has several processing stages that are to a greater …
Ping An Technology (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd.（平安科技（深圳）有限公司）
Metaverse is an interactive world that combines reality and virtuality, where participants can be virtual avatars. Anyone can hold a concert in a virtual concert hall, and users can quickly identify the real singer behind the virtual idol through the singer identification. Most singer identification methods are processed using the frame-level features. However, expect the singer's timbre, the music frame includes music information, such as melodiousness, rhythm, and tonal. It means the music information is noise for using frame-level features to identify the singers. In this paper, instead of …
ENS（巴黎高等师范学院）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；EHESS（社会科学高等学院）；INRIA（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；University of Paris（巴黎大学）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）
Our native language influences the way we perceive speech sounds, affecting our ability to discriminate non-native sounds. We compare two ideas about the influence of the native language on speech perception: the Perceptual Assimilation Model, which appeals to a mental classification of sounds into native phoneme categories, versus the idea that rich, fine-grained phonetic representations tuned to the statistics of the native language, are sufficient. We operationalize this idea using representations from two state-of-the-art speech models, a Dirichlet process Gaussian mixture model and the mo…
Every sound that we hear is the result of successive convolutional operations (e.g. room acoustics, microphone characteristics, resonant properties of the instrument itself, not to mention characteristics and limitations of the sound reproduction system). In this work we seek to determine the best room in which to perform a particular piece using AI. Additionally, we use room acoustics as a way to enhance the perceptual qualities of a given sound. Historically, rooms (particularly Churches and concert halls) were designed to host and serve specific musical functions. In some cases the architec…
Interactive audio spatialization technology previously developed for video game authoring and rendering has evolved into an essential component of platforms enabling shared immersive virtual experiences for future co-presence, remote collaboration and entertainment applications. New wearable virtual and augmented reality displays employ real-time binaural audio computing engines rendering multiple digital objects and supporting the free navigation of networked participants or their avatars through a juxtaposition of environments, real and virtual, often referred to as the Metaverse. These appl…
NYU Shanghai（上海纽约大学）；City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；New York University（纽约大学）；Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）
The relationship between perceptual loudness and physical attributes of sound is an important subject in both computer music and psychoacoustics. Early studies of "equal-loudness contour" can trace back to the 1920s and the measured loudness with respect to intensity and frequency has been revised many times since then. However, most studies merely focus on synthesized sound, and the induced theories on natural tones with complex timbre have rarely been justified. To this end, we investigate both theory and applications of natural-tone loudness perception in this paper via modeling piano tone.…
Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg（卡尔·冯·奥西茨基大学奥尔登堡分校）
Late reverberation involves the superposition of many sound reflections resulting in a diffuse sound field. Since the spatially resolved perception of individual diffuse reflections is impossible, simplifications can potentially be made for modelling late reverberation in room acoustics simulations with reduced spatial resolution. Such simplifications are desired for interactive, real-time virtual acoustic environments with applications in hearing research and for the evaluation of hearing supportive devices. In this context, the number and spatial arrangement of loudspeakers used for playback…
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
Augmented listening devices, such as hearing aids and augmented reality headsets, enhance human perception by changing the sounds that we hear. Microphone arrays can improve the performance of listening systems in noisy environments, but most array-based listening systems are designed to isolate a single sound source from a mixture. This work considers a source-remixing filter that alters the relative level of each source independently. Remixing rather than separating sounds can help to improve perceptual transparency: it causes less distortion to the signal spectrum and especially to the inte…
In daily life, social interaction and acoustic communication often take place in complex acoustic environments (CAE) with a variety of interfering sounds and reverberation. For hearing research and the evaluation of hearing systems, simulated CAEs using virtual reality techniques have gained interest in the context of ecological validity. In the current study, the effect of scene complexity and visual representation of the scene on psychoacoustic measures like sound source location, distance perception, loudness, speech intelligibility, and listening effort in a virtual audio-visual environmen…
For 6-DOF (degrees of freedom) interactive virtual acoustic environments (VAEs), the spatial rendering of diffuse late reverberation in addition to early (specular) reflections is important. In the interest of computational efficiency, the acoustic simulation of the late reverberation can be simplified by using a limited number of spatially distributed virtual reverb sources (VRS) each radiating incoherent signals. A sufficient number of VRS is needed to approximate spatially anisotropic late reverberation, e.g., in a room with inhomogeneous distribution of absorption at the boundaries. Here, …
Music Representing Corpus Virtual: An Open Sourced Library for Explorative Music Generation, Sound Design, and Instrument Creation with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；University of Maryland（马里兰大学）
In developing virtual acoustic environments, it is important to understand the relationship between the computation cost and the perceptual significance of the resultant numerical error. In this paper, we propose a quality criterion that evaluates the error significance of path-tracing-based sound propagation simulators. We present an analytical formula that estimates the error signal power spectrum. With this spectrum estimation, we can use a modified Zwicker's loudness model to calculate the relative loudness of the error signal masked by the ideal output. Our experimental results show that …
Given an input sound signal and a target virtual sound source, sound spatialisation algorithms manipulate the signal so that a listener perceives it as though it were emitted from the target source. There exist several established spatialisation approaches that deliver satisfactory results when loudspeakers are used to playback the manipulated signal. As headphones have a number of desirable characteristics over loudspeakers, such as portability, isolation from the surrounding environment, cost and ease of use, it is interesting to explore how a sense of acoustic space can be conveyed through …
We present a novel hybrid sound propagation algorithm for interactive applications. Our approach is designed for dynamic scenes and uses a neural network-based learned scattered field representation along with ray tracing to generate specular, diffuse, diffraction, and occlusion effects efficiently. We use geometric deep learning to approximate the acoustic scattering field using spherical harmonics. We use a large 3D dataset for training, and compare its accuracy with the ground truth generated using an accurate wave-based solver. The additional overhead of computing the learned scattered fie…
Peking University（北京大学）；University of Maryland at College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校）
We present a novel learning-based modal sound synthesis approach that includes a mixed vibration solver for modal analysis and an end-to-end sound radiation network for acoustic transfer. Our mixed vibration solver consists of a 3D sparse convolution network and a Locally Optimal Block Preconditioned Conjugate Gradient module (LOBPCG) for iterative optimization. Moreover, we highlight the correlation between a standard modal vibration solver and our network architecture. Our radiation network predicts the Far-Field Acoustic Transfer maps (FFAT Maps) from the surface vibration of the object. Th…
UT Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；FAIR, Meta AI（元人工智能基础人工智能研究院）；Reality Labs at Meta（元现实实验室）；Georgia Tech（佐治亚理工学院）
We introduce SoundSpaces 2.0, a platform for on-the-fly geometry-based audio rendering for 3D environments. Given a 3D mesh of a real-world environment, SoundSpaces can generate highly realistic acoustics for arbitrary sounds captured from arbitrary microphone locations. Together with existing 3D visual assets, it supports an array of audio-visual research tasks, such as audio-visual navigation, mapping, source localization and separation, and acoustic matching. Compared to existing resources, SoundSpaces 2.0 has the advantages of allowing continuous spatial sampling, generalization to novel e…
