Episode 93 Juergen Herre (MPEG-I)

Virtual Acoustics

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Episode 93 Juergen Herre (MPEG-I)

Summary

This episode is sponsored by Innovate Audio. Innovate Audio offers a range of software-based spatial audio processing tools. Their latest product, panLab Console, is a macOS application that adds 3D spatial audio rendering capabilities to live audio mixing consoles, including popular models from Yamaha, Midas and Behringer. This means you can achieve an object-based audio workflow, utilising the hardware you already own. Immersive Audio Podcast listeners can get an exclusive 20% discount on all panLab licences, use code Immersive20 at checkout. Find out more at innovateaudio.co.uk *Offer available until June 2024.*

In this episode of the Immersive Audio Podcast, Oliver Kadel and Monica Bolles are joined by the Chief Executive Scientist for Audio and Multimedia fields at Fraunhofer International Audio Laboratories – Juergen Herre from Erlangen, Germany.

Juergen Herre received a degree in Electrical Engineering from  Friedrich-Alexander-Universität in 1989 and a Ph.D. degree for his work on error concealment of coded audio. He joined the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits (IIS) in Erlangen, Germany, in 1989. There he has been involved in the development of perceptual coding algorithms for high-quality audio, including the well-known ISO/MPEG-Audio Layer III  coder (aka “MP3”). In 1995, he joined Bell Laboratories for a PostDoc term working on the development of MPEG-2 Advanced Audio Coding (AAC).  By the end of 1996, he went back to Fraunhofer IIS to work on the development of more advanced multimedia technology including MPEG-4,  MPEG-7, MPEG-D, MPEG-H and MPEG-I, currently as the Chief Executive  Scientist for the Audio/Multimedia activities at Fraunhofer IIS,  Erlangen. In September 2010, Prof. Dr. Herre was appointed full professor at the University of Erlangen and the International Audio  Laboratories Erlangen. He is an expert in low-bit-rate audio coding/perceptual audio coding, spatial audio coding, parametric audio object coding, perceptual signal processing and semantic audio processing.  Prof. Dr.-Ing. Herre is a fellow member of the Audio Engineering Society  (AES), chair of the AES Technical Committee on Coding of Audio Signals and vice chair of the AES Technical Council. Prof. Dr.-Ing. Juergen  Herre is a senior member of the IEEE, a member of the IEEE Technical  Committee on Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing, served as an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing and was an active member of the MPEG audio subgroup for almost three decades.

Juergen explains the science of the key technology concepts behind the worldwide adopted family of MPEG codecs and we discuss the latest addition of the reference model for the virtual and augmented reality audio standard – MPEG-I Immersive Audio.

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Show Notes

Juergen Herre – https://www.audiolabs-erlangen.de/fau/professor/herre

International Audio Laboratories, Erlangen – https://www.audiolabs-erlangen.de

Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits (IIS) – https://www.iis.fraunhofer.de/en/ff/amm/for/audiolabs.html

Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg –  https://www.fau.eu/

AES Paper MPEG-I Immersive Audio — Reference Model For The Virtual/Augmented Reality Audio Standard – https://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=22127

Perceptual Audio Codecs Tutorial “What to Listen For” – https://aes2.org/resources/audio-topics/audio_coding/perceptual-audio-codecs/

Survey

We want to hear from you! We really value our community and would appreciate it if you would take our very quick survey and help us make the Immersive Audio Podcast even better: surveymonkey.co.uk/r/3Y9B2MJ Thank you!

Credits

This episode was produced by Oliver Kadel and Emma Rees and included music by Rhythm Scott.

Episode 87 Lorenzo Picinali (Imperial College London)

Summary

This episode is sponsored by Innovate Audio. Innovate Audio offers a range of software-based spatial audio processing tools. Their latest product, panLab Console, is a macOS application that adds 3D spatial audio rendering capabilities to live audio mixing consoles, including popular models from Yamaha, Midas and Behringer. This means you can achieve an object-based audio workflow, utilising the hardware you already own. Immersive Audio Podcast listeners can get an exclusive 20% discount on all panLab licences, use code Immersive20 at checkout. Find out more at innovateaudio.co.uk *Offer available until June 2024.*

In this episode of the Immersive Audio Podcast, Oliver Kadel is joined by the academic and researcher at Imperial College – Lorenzo Picinali from London, United Kingdom.

Lorenzo Picinali is a Reader at Imperial College London, leading the Audio Experience Design team. His research focuses on spatial acoustics and immersive audio, looking at perceptual and computational matters, as well as real-life applications. In the past years Lorenzo worked on projects related to spatial hearing and rendering, hearing aids technologies, and acoustic virtual and augmented reality. He has also been active in the field of eco-acoustic monitoring, designing autonomous recorders and using audio to better understand humans’ impact on remote ecosystems.

Lorenzo talks about the breadth of research initiatives in spatial audio under his leadership of the Audio Experience Design group and we discuss the recently published SONICOM HRTF Dataset developed to improve personalised listening experience.

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Newsboard

Our friends at the Sennheiser Ambeo Mobility team are on the lookout for a Senior Audio Engineer, check out the link for more details – https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/3725223871/

Show Notes

Lorenzo Picinali – https://www.imperial.ac.uk/people/l.picinali

Imperial College London – https://www.imperial.ac.uk/

Audio Experience Design – https://www.axdesign.co.uk/

SONICOM Website – http://www.sonicom.eu

The SONICOM HRTF Dataset – https://www.axdesign.co.uk/publications/the-sonicom-hrtf-dataset

The SONICOM HRTF Dataset AES Paper – https://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=22128

Immersive Audio Demonstration – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWmKNNQpZJA&t=2s

Survey

We want to hear from you! We really value our community and would appreciate it if you would take our very quick survey and help us make the Immersive Audio Podcast even better: surveymonkey.co.uk/r/3Y9B2MJ Thank you!

Credits

This episode was produced by Oliver Kadel and Emma Rees and included music by Rhythm Scott.

Episode 66 Sennheiser AMBEO Mobility (Part 3)

Summary

In this three-part series of the Immersive Audio Podcast, Oliver Kadel will travel to Zurich in Switzerland for an exclusive opportunity to speak to the entire Ambeo Mobility team. The use of spatial audio is becoming ever so ubiquitous, it seems that it’s just a matter of time before we get to enjoy immersive content from the comfort of our cars on a regular basis. Join us on this journey to explore and learn about the cutting-edge applications of spatial audio in automotive.

Veronique Larcher (Director)

Dr Veronique Larcher is the Director of AMBEO Immersive Audio, Sennheiser’s brand for immersive audio products and experiences. She is also a founding advisor at Earkick, a startup focused on monitoring anxiety using audio biomarkers, among others. Veronique has over 20 years of experience in the areas of audio and venture building – before launching AMBEO in 2016, she held multiple roles spearheading innovation at Sennheiser, most notably founding and managing their Strategic Innovation office in San Francisco. Veronique holds a PhD in 3D Audio for Virtual Reality from Ircam (France) and a Bachelor’s degree in Economics and Finance from the Paris Institute of Political Studies.

Luca Brambilla (Project Manager)

Luca is the project manager of the Sennheiser AMBEO Mobility initiative, part of the founding team of the project and a real car enthusiast. As a car audiophile, he is motivated by bringing innovative audio technology into the most prestigious cars in the industry and is excited by the opportunities the future of mobility hold. His background is in Industrial Engineering, and with a Master’s degree in Management, Technology and Economics from ETH Zurich, he is skilled at combining technical knowledge and management expertise. In the team, he covers the role of project coordination, and planning, and is in charge of customer and supplier relations.

Sofia Brazzola (Brand & Marketing Manager)

Sofia is leading Brand & Marketing efforts aimed at the growth of the corporate venture AMBEO Mobility, launching Sennheiser in the automotive industry. She has been in the team for several years under different capacities leveraging her Design Strategy, User Experience and Marketing skills aimed at de-risking and launching product concepts in new opportunity markets for Sennheiser internationally, including VR/AR and immersive music streaming. In her current role, she coordinates digital and event marketing activities designs brand strategies and is responsible for Sennheiser AMBEO’s brand positioning in the automotive world. She recently graduated with an MBA from Imperial College in London and holds a Master’s degree in Design from the Zurich University of the Arts.

Rui Wang (Customer Developer)

Rui is a digital marketer, cross-cultural communicator, and partnership developer. She holds a master’s degree in European and Asian Business Management from the University of Zurich. With four years of experience working with top technology companies, she has a keen understanding of the needs of B2C & B2B clients in the field of innovation. As a bridge between the West and the East within the Sennheiser AMBEO team, she takes pride in providing market insights and data-driven business strategies. In addition to her primary job functions, she has been certified as a Data Analyst with Python for her commitment to data analysis.

Lorenz Bucher (Software Architect)

Lorenz Bucher is part of Sennheiser’s interdisciplinary AMBEO Mobility team. As a software architect, he’s eagerly striving to shape the future of automotive sound experiences and leading Sennheiser towards software excellence. He has a background in electrical engineering and spent many years of his career developing embedded audio DSP systems and implementing audio algorithms for high-end professional mixing consoles and consumer electronics. Being an avid musician in his spare time, Lorenz has found the sweet spot where he can combine his love for music with his passion for tweaking the technology to create the ‘wow’.

Sofia Checa (Software Engineer)

Sofia is a software engineer specializing in spatial audio. She has a degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Yale University and is also a classically trained cellist. She joined the team in 2019 to help create the first AMBEO Mobility Demo Car and has been fascinated with the project ever since. Sofia loves her job because it allows her to tap into both her technical side and her artistic side each and every day. Her responsibilities range from writing code to critical listening to developing demo experiences.

Henrik Oppermann (Head of Sound)

Henrik Oppermann (M.Mus.) is a leading 3D sound specialist, bringing with him over 15 years of experience in recording studio-quality audio on location for film, advertising, music industry clients and 3D sound installations. Henrik has worked on over 150 VR and AR projects, capturing 3D audio in a number of challenging environments, including low-flying military aircraft, formula one race cars, refugee camps, mountain peaks and concert halls around the world. An expert in his field, Henrik has developed hardware and software audio applications and workflows for VR collaboration with leading sound partners, to deliver the best possible Immersive Sound. Henrik joined Sennheiser AMBEO Immersive Audio as the Head of Sound in February 2022.

Hans-Martin Buff has been a Recording engineer and music producer since 1993, when he graduated from Music Tech vocational college in Minneapolis, USA. He began his career at Pachyderm Studios, where he made excellent coffee and then proceeded to hone his studio chops by assisting on projects such as Live’s million-seller “Throwing Copper”. Hans-Martin worked his way through various Minnesota rock’n’roll factories before he found a more permanent home at Prince’s Paisley Park Studios, whose personal engineer he became and remained for four funky years. During this period he wasn’t only responsible for His Purple Majesty’s recordings, but also for the studio affairs of world-renowned artists, including No Doubt, Chaka Khan and Larry Graham. Being a native of Germany, Hans-Martin Buff relocated to his home country in 2001, where he continued his career as an independent recording engineer and producer, and where he has since mixed and recorded a host of national and international talent, such as Mousse T., Joss Stone, Zucchero, Eric Burdon, Roachford, Maxi Priest and the Scorpions. Since 2018, Hans-Martin has explored the subject 3D-Audio for headphones, and he is now considered an industry expert. He has written a book on the subject and holds an “MA in Immersive Music Production”.

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Show Notes

Sennheiser – https://en-uk.sennheiser.com

Immersive Audio – https://en-uk.sennheiser.com/ambeo

AMBEO Mobility Official Page – https://en-uk.sennheiser.com/ambeo-mobility

AMBEO Mobility LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/ambeo-mobility

Survey

We want to hear from you! We really value our community and would appreciate it if you would take our very quick survey and help us make the Immersive Audio Podcast even better: surveymonkey.co.uk/r/3Y9B2MJ Thank you!

Credits

This episode was produced by Oliver Kadel and Emma Rees and included music by Rhythm Scott.

Episode 62 Nikunj Raghuvanshi & Noel Cross (Microsoft – Physics Based Virtual Acoustics)

Summary

In this episode of the Immersive Audio Podcast, Oliver Kadel, Monica Bolles and Bjørn Jacobsen are joined by a Principal Dev Leader at the Mixed Reality division at Microsft Noel Cross and Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research Nikunj Raghuvanshi from Redmond, US.

Nikunj likes to invent techniques that create immersive sight and sound from computation. He is endlessly fascinated with simulating the laws of physics in real-time and finds it thrilling to search for simple algorithms that unfold into complex physical behaviour. He has over a decade of research and development experience at the intersection of computational audio, graphics, and physics, with over fifty papers and patents. His inventions have been successfully deployed in the industry, particularly Project Acoustics, which is bringing immersive sound propagation to many major AAA game franchises today. Nikunj is currently a Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research. Previously, he initiated interactive sound simulation research at UNC-Chapel Hill during his PhD studies, whose codebase was acquired by Microsoft. 

Noel grew up playing games on my Commodore 64 and Amiga computers. His love for multimedia computing helped him to start working at Microsoft as an intern in 1991 in the multimedia team. This was the age of the SoundBlaster 16 ISA cards and CD-ROMs were just being introduced into PCs.  Out of the multimedia team, the DirectX team was born to accelerate the development of high-quality games for the PC. Noel worked on DirectSound and audio drivers for Windows getting a taste of the game development community attending several GDCs in the 90s. This was the first time he was introduced to 3D audio algorithms and at the time the technology didn’t impress much.  Through the 2000s, he worked on every release of Windows with the focus on improving the audio subsystem. This led to the complete overhaul of the audio infrastructure on the Windows Vista platform which has remained largely intact since introduced in 2006.  The most current stop on his Microsoft journey is working on Mixed Reality devices. He worked on the speech and audio functionality exposed from HoloLens and Windows Mixed Reality devices with a concentration on spatial audio. After having lackluster impact in the 90s with spatial audio, he’s been reinvigorated working on this technology with the introduction of high-quality HRTFs and head-tracking services to complete the experience. Spatial audio processing has also led Noel to better understand the impact of acoustics on virtual 3d worlds. His team is currently working on Project Acoustics which allows developers of 3d titles to take advantage of wave-based simulations to handle how audio propagates in the real world.

In this episode, Nikunj and Noel dive deep into the topic of physics-based virtual acoustics along with Project Triton and Project Acoustics covering fundamental theory, research, technology and case studies.

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Show Notes

Project Acoustics: Making Waves with Triton – https://youtu.be/pIzwo-MxCC8

Gears of War 4, Project Triton: Pre-Computed Environmental Wave Acoustics  – https://youtu.be/qCUEGvIgco8

NOTAM – https://notam.no/meetups/the-ambisonics-salon/ 

Nikunj Raghuvanshi’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikunj-raghuvanshi-a499172b/

Noel Cross’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/noel-cross-0b9a51167/

Microsoft Soundscape – https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/product/soundscape/

Microsoft HoloLens – https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/hololens

AVAR 2022: AES 4th International Conference on Audio for Virtual and Augmented Reality – https://aes2.org/contributions/avar-2022/

Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II – Gameplay reveal – https://youtu.be/fukYzbthEVU //

https://twitter.com/dagadi/status/1470000580223504389)

Directional Sources & Listeners in Interactive Sound Propagation using Reciprocal Wave Field Coding – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvWlCQGZpz4

​​Project Acoustics | Game Developers Conference 2019- https://youtu.be/uY4G-GUAQIE

Interactive sound simulation: Rendering immersive soundscapes in games and virtual reality – https://youtu.be/2sKPDGBsM0Q

Project Triton Research website – https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-triton/

Notes on Parametric Wave Field Coding for Precomputed Sound Propagation – https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/parametric-wave-field-coding-precomputed-sound-propagation/

Survey

We want to hear from you! We really value our community and would appreciate it if you would take our very quick survey and help us make the Immersive Audio Podcast even better: surveymonkey.co.uk/r/3Y9B2MJ Thank you!

Credits

This episode was produced by Oliver Kadel and Emma Rees and included music by Rhythm Scott.