CONTEXT

This measurement sessions take place in the frame of the Listen project, which is a shared-cost RTD project in the Information Society Technologies (IST) Program of the European Commission's Fifth Framework Program. Listen project aims at augmenting the physical environment through a dynamic soundscape, which users experience over motion-tracked wireless headphones. Immersive audio-augmented environments are created by combining advanced user modeling methods with binaural-based spatial audio rendering.

The underlying audio system is a signal processing engine that provides a 3D simulation of a virtual sound scene over headphones. It must allow positioning multiple sound sources in 3D space, is also adapted to the orientation of the visitor, which is provided by a motion-tracking system, and must take into account morphological features involved into the localization process. This implies a specific research on relationships between users' head and ear dimensions and spectral and temporal properties of the HRIR/HRTF, which have thus to be measured.

Two partners of the Listen project, AKG and Ircam, which are involved in the audio part of the project, have both performed the HRIR/HRTF and morphological measurement sessions whose results are available on this web site.