Assessment of sound spatialisation algorithms for sonic rendering with headsets
This work addresses the problem of adapting spatial audio for headphone use, which is incremental as it reviews existing methods rather than introducing new ones.
The paper surveys traditional sound spatialisation algorithms designed for loudspeakers and evaluates their adaptability to headphones, aiming to convey a sense of acoustic space through headsets.
Given an input sound signal and a target virtual sound source, sound spatialisation algorithms manipulate the signal so that a listener perceives it as though it were emitted from the target source. There exist several established spatialisation approaches that deliver satisfactory results when loudspeakers are used to playback the manipulated signal. As headphones have a number of desirable characteristics over loudspeakers, such as portability, isolation from the surrounding environment, cost and ease of use, it is interesting to explore how a sense of acoustic space can be conveyed through them. This article first surveys traditional spatialisation approaches intended for loudspeakers, and then reviews them with regard to their adaptability to headphones.