News-20150515

Multizone Wideband Reproduction of Speech Soundfields Associate Professor Christian Ritz School of Electrical, Computer and Telecommunications Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences University of Wollongong, Australia

TIME: 2015/05/15 VENUE: Tsinghua University, FIT-1-315

Abstract The traditional problem of sound field reproduction using loudspeakers aims to generate a single spatial audio scene within a finite region in space or zone. For example, surround sound is the reproduction of a two dimensional sound field zone using an array of five loudspeakers. In contrast, multizone sound field reproduction aims to simultaneously generate more than one sound field zone using a single array of loudspeakers. This presentation will begin with an overview of traditional approaches to reproducing single sound field zones using loudspeakers before introducing the concept of multizone spatial audio reproduction and providing an overview of current approaches. This will be followed by recent research into multizone spatial audio for speech sound fields conducted at A/Prof Ritz’s speech and audio research group at the University of Wollongong. Challenges and opportunities for further research will then be presented.

Brief Biography Christian graduated from the University of Wollongong in 1999 with a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering and a Bachelor of Mathematics and a PhD in Electrical Engineering at the University of Wollongong in 2003. His PhD research focused on very low bit rate coding of wideband speech using Waveform Interpolation (WI). Since 2003, Christian has held a position within the School of Electrical, Computer and Telecommunications Engineering at the University of Wollongong and was promoted to an Associate Professor in 2013. He is a member of the Visual and Audio Signal Processing Lab of the Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) Research Institute and leads the speech and audio signal processing research activities of the institute and School. His current research interests include single and multichannel speech and audio signal processing, spatial audio signal processing, acoustic signal processing for microphone and loudspeaker arrays, acoustic design of musical instruments and multimedia Quality of Experience (QoE).

For more information see: http://www.uow.edu.au/~critz/.