The Estimation of Acoustic Parameters and Representations based on Room Impulse Responses

Abstract

We are surrounded by all kinds of sounds at all times. What we hear varies with the physical environment and our position. Room impulse responses (RIRs) characterize the effect of the environment on a sound produced by a source. A first goal of this dissertation is to analyze RIRs and investigate how to extract environmental information from RIRs. Immersive digital environments, such as virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), play an increasingly important role in society. Spatial audio, aiming to give listeners a 3D audio experience, is vital to immersive digital environments. Omnidirectional RIRs do not provide explicit spatial information for room acoustics applications. As a result, the description and reproduction of the sound field is of great importance for spatial audio. Specifically, we consider higher order ambisonics, which is the prevalent method to represent the sound field around a listener. The synthesis of ambisonics signals is a second goal of this dissertation....