Abstract : Virtual and augmented acoustic reality often aims at creating perceptually plausible copies of existing acoustic environments. In many cases, humans play a fundamental role in such environments as acoustic sources and receivers. Humans as sources are acoustically characterized by their directivity, which describes the direction and phoneme dependent sound propagation from the mouth to a point in the free field. Humans as receivers are described by the so called head-related transfer function (HRTF) that give the direction dependent propagation from a free field source to the ear channel entrances. In both cases the corresponding transfer functions are non-trivial to measure and existing data often needs to interpolated to a higher spatial resolution to be ready for acoustic sound propagation models used in virtual and augmented reality. In this talk, I will give an overview of the acoustic characteristics of humans as sources and receivers along with corresponding measurement and interpolation approaches. I will also discuss the perceptual quality of the interpolation approaches and give a brief overview of perceptual evaluation approaches in general.

Bio : Fabian Brinkmann received an M.A. degree in communication sciences and technical acoustics in 2011 and Dr. rer. nat. degree in 2019 from the Technische Universität Berlin, Germany. His work focuses on the fields of signal processing and evaluation approaches for audio for virtual and augmented reality. Fabian is a member of the AES, German Acoustical Society (DEGA), and the European Acoustics Association (EAA) technical committee for psychological and physiological acoustics.