3D Audio

[Carlos Vila Deutschbein]

Hello all !

> If you search JASA (Journal of the Acoustical Society of America) there
> are a bizillion articles.

Let me add my 2 cents to all this 3D Sound discussion.
I have read many articles and some books about 3D audio, recently I  even 
participated in an experiment a fellow student made about 3D positioning of
audio sources in an anechoic chamber. After all this investigations I
finally have come to one conclusion: Localizing an audio source in 3D space
is 20% /physiological/ parameters (i.e. how our ears work, involving HRTF,
Interaural Time/level Differences and other aspects) and 80% /cognition/
(i.e. what you know about the sound source) 
For example: If you are in the street and you hear the sound of an airplane,
your brain automatically puts the sound up in the sky skipping all those
physiological aspects. The sound *must* come from that direction. This
happens with most sound perception in real life and memory plays a decisive
role in this case (that wasn't the first airplane you had seen in your
life). 
And what happens when you don't know where a sound comes from: You move your
head around trying to catch the physical parameters of the sound because
you don't have any cognitive reference about it. It once took us 3 minutes
to find a ringing cell-phone in a full class-room!! 

That's the main problem when simulating 3D space. You can fool the ears but
you can't fool the brain.
In my opinion 3D audio simulation can only be associated with virtual
reality environments and only (arguably) with multi-channel systems (not
plain stereo)

PS: Don't wanted to discourage anyone, just tell my experiences :)


Regards
-- 
==================================================
Carlos Vila Deutschbein       si04697 at salleURL.edu
Enginyeria La Salle     www.salleURL.edu/~si04697/
-------------- Barcelona, Spain ------------------