Assessment of sound spatialisation algorithms for sonic rendering with headsets

TL;DR

This paper surveys traditional sound spatialisation algorithms designed for loudspeakers and evaluates their adaptability for headphone-based sonic rendering, highlighting challenges and potential solutions.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive review of existing spatialisation methods and assesses their suitability for headphone use, bridging a gap in current research.

Findings

Traditional algorithms often require adaptation for headphones

Headphone-specific spatialisation techniques can improve immersive sound

Survey highlights key challenges in headphone-based spatial audio

Abstract

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.