Paper Title: Binaural Audio -- From Ideals to Reality

Speaker: Professor Brian F.G. Katz (Sorbonne University, France)

Moderator: Prof. Bosun Tse

Presentation time: 10:00am, Wednesday, December 18, 2019

Venue: Lecture Hall 213, Building 18, Wushan Campus

Welcome teachers and students to join us!

School of Physics and Optoelectronics

9 December 2019

Report Summary:

Our current understand of binaural hearing is built upon a foundation of over a century of research from which the basic building blocks of spatial hearing have been established. While these concrete notions offer direct insight into many perceptual phenomena, recent advances in computational processing and tracking technologies mean that we can manipulate acoustic cues and create complex text conditions that were difficult to impossible only 5 or 10 years ago. These new binaural and multimodal rendering tools have allowed for more in-depth investigations of spatial hearing which open up questions on how in practice humans understand auditory space, beyond historical works carried out in limited environments. This talk will present an introduction of those basic notions and examine in more detail, though a series of recent studies, how all is not as clear as it seems.

Brief Introduction of speaker:

Brian F.G. Katz a CNRS Research Director at the Sorbonne Universite, Institut Jean Le Rond D 'Alembert in the group Lutheries - Acoustics - Music. His fields of interest include spatial 3-D audio rendering and perception, room acoustics, HCI, and virtual reality. With a background in physics and philosophy, he obtained his Ph.D. in acoustics from Penn State in 1998 and his HDR in engineering sciences from UMPC in 2011. Before joining CNRS, he worked for various acoustic consulting firms, including Artec Consultants Inc., ARUP & Partners, and Kahle Acoustics. He has also worked at the Laboratoire d'Acoustique Musical (UPMC), IRCAM, and LIMSI-CNRS.