Supervision:

Project type:

Finished

In fall 2016, the new building « Under One Roof » will open on the EPFL campus. In this building, an "innovation space » will demonstrate the new technologies developed at EPFL around music, acoustics, audio/video signal processing, and even architecture or digital humanities. It will host the new « Montreux Jazz Heritage Lab », an immersive and interactive environment for the public to discover up to 5'000 hours of concerts from the Montreux Jazz Festival archive which is currently in digitization at the EPFL Metamedia Center (link to the website). This project proposes to compare the new types of 3D Audio rendering systems such as Wavefield Sythesis, Ambisonics, VBAP, Cinema style surround etc. The project will consist in setting a listening test procedure, including the implementation and test of the different 3D audio rendering algorithms, on an existing 64 loudspeaker system. The expected outcome will be the definition of perceptual cues regarding spatial rendition and the evaluation of the different systems performances. The aim of this project is to find the most suitable system or combination of systems in terms of precision in auditory localisation and clarity of sound coloration amongst other factors. The results of the findings will highly influence the choice of 3D Audio system installed at the future Montreux Jazz Heritage Lab.

Nature of work: theory (20%), programming (60%), experimentation (20%)

Requirements: Audio Engineering (MA1) course (optional), Matlab or MaxMSP or VST programming (C++ or Java or .NET).