Federico Avanzini: A mixed structural modeling approach to personalized 3D binaural sound rendering

When: Thursday, May 15th, 2014 @ 5:00 PM – 6:00 PM

Where: Room G.07/a, Informatics Forum, Crichton Street, University of Edinburgh

Seminar Title

A mixed structural modeling approach to personalized 3D binaural sound rendering

Seminar Speaker(s)

Dr. Federico Avanzini (Sound and Music Computing Group, Dept. of Information Engineering, University of Padova, Italy)

Seminar Abstract

This seminar presents ongoing research on a novel approach to 3D sound rendering, that uses personalized head-related transfer functions (HRTFs) to synthesize binaural sound signals delivered through headphones.

We will briefly discuss issues related to HRTF measurement, processing, and modeling, as well as their implications in a 3D sound rendering pipeline. As these transfer functions are strongly subject dependent, special emphasis will be given to the problem of individual HRTF measurements and individual customization of HRTF models.

We will then introduce and formalize a novel approach to HRTF modeling, called Mixed Structural Modeling (MSM). This can be regarded as a generalization and extension of the structural modeling approach first defined by Brown and Duda back in 1998. Thanks to the flexibility of the MSM approach, a large number of solutions for building custom binaural audio displays can be considered and evaluated, with the final goal of constructing a HRTF model that is fully customizable depending on individual user anthropometry.

Possible solutions for building partial HRTFs (pHRTFs) of the head, torso, and pinna of a specific listener will described and exemplified. Some example applications in the design of personal auditory displays in multimodal virtual environments will be finally illustrated.

Speaker Bio

Federico Avanzini received the Ph.D. degree in Information Engineering from the University of Padova, Italy, in 2001. Since 2002 he has been with the Sound and Music Computing group at the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Padova, where he is currently Assistant Professor. His main research interests are in sound synthesis and processing, and multimodal interaction. He has been key researcher in numerous european and national projects, PI of the EU project DREAM (Culture2007) and of industry-funded projects.

He has authored more than 100 publications on peer-reviewed international journals and conferences. He has served in numerous program committees and editorial committees of international journals and conferences. He was the General Chair of the 2011 International Sound and Music Computing Conference. He is currently Associate Editor of Acta Acustica united with Acustica, journal of the European Acoustics Association, for the subject Musical Acoustics.