I'm very happy to announce that Natalie Angus will be doing her PhD defence on Real-Time Binaural Auralization on August 1st. Natalie is supervised by myself and Dr. Simon Lui (Director of Tencent Music). Download and read her thesis here. Some information about the seminar:

Title: Real-Time Binaural Auralization

When: 15:00, August 1st, 2018.

Where: Think Thank 20 (Building 2, Level 3), SUTD

Abstract
Auralization is a process to render acoustic phenomena in a given virtual space. In the literature, it is often called as room acoustic rendering or room simulation. The result of the simulation can be categorized into either monaural or binaural auralization. In monaural auralization, we simulate how acoustic waves emitted from one or more sources behave at a particular location in the virtual space. Binaural reproduction of room acoustics is a tougher task, because it also simulates how these sources actually sounds like to a human listener. In other words, it gives a three-dimensional listening experience. More processing steps that have to be done include the simulation of the effect of head, shoulder, and pinnae shadowing. Room simulation algorithms are mainly utilized in virtual reality systems that are used for gaming, music production, entertainment, training, conditioning, or study of an acoustic space. The required level of accuracy heavily depends on the context of application. We may trade-off some level of accuracy in order to achieve faster computational time. The idea of designing an algorithm that is both accurate and fast remains open for research. In this study we propose a perceptually convincing and extremely efficient model that can reproduce binaural room acoustics even on mobile devices in real-time.

Natalie Angus
Natalie received her bachelor's degree in Information Systems Technology and Design (Robotics) from the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) in 2015. She joined the Information Systems Technology and Design (ISTD) pillar of SUTD as a PhD candidate in September 2015, under the supervision of Prof. Simon Lui and Prof. Dorien Herremans. Her research includes audio signal processing, room acoustic modelling, and deep learning for music information retrieval. She also enjoys teaching and was granted the Graduate Teaching Excellence Award in 2017.