Design culture is tentatively embracing the acoustic conditions and auditory awareness of spaces and objects, thus creating new opportunities for spatial sound practitioners. This thesis examines the making of seven spatial sound design projects in diverse milieux and an eighth project - the establishment of an electroacoustic studio within a school of architecture and design. The projects and the studio are considered models for the ways in which electroacoustic practices might advance the auditory spatial awareness of students and researchers in the academy, and the general community through an interlocking program of teaching, research and events. The creation of the projects and establishment of the studios also articulate a transformation in my own practice from composer to design researcher. Five of the projects are intended to engender in listeners a greater awareness of the acoustic environment and the auditory spatial qualities of those environments, whi ch listeners daily inhabit. Supporting these project studies is a discussion on issues and conditions of making and materials to elucidate my approach to creating spatial sound designs in diverse milieux. Two of the projects investigated the auditory spatial awareness of different communities in Melbourne, with the view of establishing ideas about the auditory culture and the actual environments of that experience. The final project is a facility to house a community of practitioners who aspire to privilege the auditory design and experience of space, through a series of research, teaching and performance activities. While evaluating just how my practice transformed over the course of the projects, I also propose that the combination of the Studio's main elements is critical to the advancement of sound-based research and design as a design discipline. Note to audio and visual materials - This thesis was accompanied by a custom-built multi-channel sound playback environment using Max/MSP and Flash. For further details on this player and Quicktime files, contact lawrence.harvey@rmit.edu.au.

This thesis presents a series of studies to explore and understand the design of eyes-free interfaces for mobile devices. The motivation is to devise a holistic design concept that is based on the WIMP paradigm and is adapted to the requirements of mobile user interaction. It is proposed that audio is a very efficient and effective modality for use in an eyes-free mobile interface. Methods to transfer the WIMP paradigm to eyes-free interfaces are proposed and evaluated. Guidelines for the implementation of the paradigm are given and – by means of an example – a holistic design concept is proposed. This thesis begins with an introduction to and critical reflection of re- currently important themes and research methods from the disciplines of psychoacoustics, psychology, and presence research. An overview of related work is given, paying particular attention to the use of interface metaphors in mobile eyes-free interfaces. The notion of distance is discussed as a method to prioritise, structure, and manage attention in eyes-free interfaces. Practical issues arising from sources becoming inaudible with increasing distance can be addressed by proposing a method modeled on echo location. This method was compared to verbally coded distance information and proved useful for identifying the closest of several objects, while verbally coded distance infor- mation was found to be more efficient for identifying the precise distance of an object. The knowledge gained from the study can contribute to improv- ing other applications, such as GPS based navigation. Furthermore, the issue of gaining an overview of accessible objects by means of sound was exam- ined. The results showed that a minimum of 200 ms between adjacent sound samples should be adhered to. Based on these findings, both earcons and synthesized speech are recommendable, although speech has the advantage of being more flexible and easier to learn. Monophonic reproduction yields comparable results to spatial reproduction. However, spatial reproduction has the additional benefit of indicating an item’s position. These results are transferable and generally relevant for the use of audio in HCI. Tactile interaction techniques were explored as a means to interact with an auditory interface and were found to be both effective and enjoyable. One of the more general observations was that 2D and 3D gestures were intuitively used by participants, who transferred their knowledge of established gestures to auditory interfaces. It was also found that participants often used 2D ges- tures to select an item and proceeded to manipulate it with a 3D gesture. The results suggest the use of a small gesture set with reversible gestures for do/undo-type actions, which was further explored in a follow up study. It could be shown that simple 3D gestures are a viable way of manipulating spatialized sound sources in a complex 3D auditory display. While the main contribution of this thesis lies in the area of HCI, pre- viously unresearched issues from adjacent disciplines that impact the user experience of auditory interfaces have been addressed. It was found that regular, predictable movement patterns in 3D audio spaces cause symptoms of simulator sickness. However, these were found to be minor and only oc- curred under extreme conditions. Additionally, the influence of the audio reproduction method on the perception of presence, social presence, and realism was examined. It was found that both stereophonic and binaural reproduction have advantages over monophonic sound reproduction: stereo- phonic sound increases the perception of social presence while binaural sound increases the feeling of being present in a virtual environment. The results are important contributions insofar as one of the main applications of mobile devices is voice based communication; it is reasonable to assume that there will be an increase in real-time voice based social and cooperative networking applications. This thesis concludes with a conceptual design of a system called “Foogue”, which uses the results of the previous experiments as the basis of an eyes-free interface that utilizes spatial audio and gesture input.

O trabalho envolve a pesquisa de técnicas para espacialização sonora musical e o desenvolvimento de um sistema de espacialização sonora sobre uma arquitetura de áudio multicanal aberta (AUDIENCE) para a auralização imersiva. Utilizando-se a técnica Ambisonics, o sistema construído permite a recriação de um campo sonoro tridimensional. O sistema reproduz virtualmente peças musicais espacializadas, por meio de um arranjo de alto-falantes em torno do ouvinte, onde as fontes sonoras podem assumir posições incomuns e movimentar-se no espaço. Através dos resultados dos experimentos musicais realizados com o sistema, chega-se a conclusão de que o sistema pode ser utilizado por compositores, regentes e produtores para a tarefa de espacialização musical. / This work involves the research of techniques for musical spatialization, and the development of a spatialization system, based on an open multichannel audio architecture (AUDIENCE) for immersive auralization. The constructed system uses the Ambisonics technique, which allows the recreation of a three-dimensional sound field. The system reproduces spatial music through an arrangement of loudspeakers around the listener where sound sources can assume some uncommon positions, and also be put into motion. From the results of experiments with a musical piece it follows that the system can be used by composers, conductors, and producers to the musical spatialization task.

O trabalho envolve a pesquisa de técnicas para espacialização sonora musical e o desenvolvimento de um sistema de espacialização sonora sobre uma arquitetura de áudio multicanal aberta (AUDIENCE) para a auralização imersiva. Utilizando-se a técnica Ambisonics, o sistema construído permite a recriação de um campo sonoro tridimensional. O sistema reproduz virtualmente peças musicais espacializadas, por meio de um arranjo de alto-falantes em torno do ouvinte, onde as fontes sonoras podem assumir posições incomuns e movimentar-se no espaço. Através dos resultados dos experimentos musicais realizados com o sistema, chega-se a conclusão de que o sistema pode ser utilizado por compositores, regentes e produtores para a tarefa de espacialização musical. / This work involves the research of techniques for musical spatialization, and the development of a spatialization system, based on an open multichannel audio architecture (AUDIENCE) for immersive auralization. The constructed system uses the Ambisonics technique, which allows the recreation of a three-dimensional sound field. The system reproduces spatial music through an arrangement of loudspeakers around the listener where sound sources can assume some uncommon positions, and also be put into motion. From the results of experiments with a musical piece it follows that the system can be used by composers, conductors, and producers to the musical spatialization task.

Tabletop computers (also known as surface computers, smart tables, and interactive surface computers) have been growing in popularity for the last decade and are poised to make in‐roads into the consumer market, opening up a new market for the games industry. However, before tabletop computers become widely accepted, there are open problems that must be addressed with respect to audio interaction including: "What loudspeaker constellations are appropriate for tabletop computers?" "How does our perception of spatial sound change with these different loudspeaker configurations?" and "What panning methods should be used to maximally use the spatial localization abilities of the user(s)?" Using a custom‐built tabletop computer setup, the work presented in this thesis investigated these three questions/problems via a series of experiments. The results of these experiments indicated that accurately localizing a virtual sound source on a horizontal surface is a difficult and error‐prone task, for all of the methods that were used. / UOIT

This thesis presents a spatial sound rendering system for the use in immersive virtual environments. Spatial sound rendering aims at artificially reproducing the acoustics of a space. It has many applications such as music production, movies, electronic gaming and teleconferencing. Conventionally, spatial sound rendering is implemented by digital signal processing algorithms derived from perceptual models or simplified physical models. While being flexible and/or efficient, these models are not able to capture the acoustical impression of a space faithfully. On the other side, convolving the sound sources with properly measured impulse responses produces the highest possible fidelity, but it is not practically useful for many applications because one impulse response corresponds to one source/listener configuration so that the sources or the listeners can not be relocated. In this thesis, techniques for measuring multichannel room impulse responses (MMRIR) are reviewed. Then, methods for analyzing measured MMRIR and rendering virtual acoustical environment based on such analysis are presented and evaluated. The analysis can be performed off-line. During this stage, a set of filters that represent the characteristics of the air and walls inside the acoustic space are obtained. Based on the assumption that the MMRIR acquired at one "good" position in the target space can be used to simulate the late reverb at other positions in the same space, appropriate segments that can be used as reverb tails are extracted from the measured MMRIR. The rendering system first constructs an early reflection model based on the positions of the listener-source pair and the filters derived, then combines with the late reverb segments to form a complete listener-source-room acoustical model that can be used to synthesize high quality multi-channel audio for arbitrary listener-source positions. Another merit of the proposed framework is that it is scalable. At the expense of slightly degraded rendering quality, the computational complexity can be greatly reduced. This makes this framework suitable for a wide range of applications that have different quality and complexity requirements. The proposed framework has been evaluated by formal listening tests. These tests have proven the effectiveness in preserving the spatial quality while positioning the listener-source pair accurately, as well as justified the key assumptions made by the proposed system.

Στα πλαίσια της διπλωματικής αυτής, έγινε ανάλυση και υλοποίησης της κωδικοποίησης αμφοιωτικών παραμέτρων (BCC-Binaural Cue Coding). Οι αλγόριθμοι της κωδικοποίησης BCC και γενικά όλες οι συναρτήσεις που χρησιμοποιήθηκαν έγιναν στο περιβάλλον της MATLAB. Για τη διαδικασία και για τον έλεγχο των αλγορίθμων έγινε χρήση στερεοφωνικών σημάτων τα οποία κωδικοποιήθηκαν σε μονοφωνικά. Στόχος της κωδικοποίησης ήταν να επιτευχθεί γρήγορη μίξη και εξαγωγή των παραμέτρων του στερεοφωνικού σήματος και ταυτόχρονα όσο το δυνατό πιο πειστική επαναδημιουργία του σήματος. Για αυτό τον λόγο στην προσπάθεια δημιουργίας προγράμματος με γρήγορη απόκριση, η κωδικοποίηση έγινε, τόσο στο πεδίο του χρόνου όσο και στο πεδίο της συχνότητας. / --

Detta kandidatarbete handlar om det spatiala ljudets vikt i en digital värld där det visuella alltsom oftast hamnar i framkant. För att utföra detta går denna text in på vad ett ljudligt narrativ är, människans lyssnade och interaktivt ljudberättande. Förståelse för alternativa koncept såsom ljud i olika kontexter, till exempel soundscapes och sound mapping presenteras med studier från R. Murray. Schafer (1994), Mark Nazemi och Diane Gromala(2012).Tillsammans med ny och gammal teknik kommer denna undersökning att försöka arbeta gentemot människans naturliga respons till ljud utan visuella referenspunkter. Detta undersöks med hjälp av spatialt ljud , ny lokaliseringsteknik; även känt som Pozyx som integrerats tillsammans med en virtuell miljö, skapat i spelmotorn Unity där användandet av ljudmotorn renderar spatialt ljud i realtid. Resultatet blev att deltagarna i denna undersökning skapade sitt egna personliga narrativ, där vi som designers skapade förutsättningarna till detta genom interaktiv teknik och selektivt lyssnande. / This bachelor thesis is about the importance of spatial sounds in a digital world where the visual most often comes to the forefront. To do this, this text goes on what a sound narrative is, the human listening and interactive sound narrative. Understanding of alternative concepts like sounds in different contexts, such as soundscapes and sound mapping, is presented withstudies by R. Murray. Schafer (1994), Mark Nazemi and Diane Gromala (2012). Along with new and old technology, this study will try to explain the human natural response to sound without visual reference points. This is investigated using spatial sound, new localization technology; also known as Pozyx, integrated with a virtual environment created in the Unity’s game engine, where the use of the audio engine delivers spatial sound in real time. As a result, the participants in this survey created their own personal narrative, where we as designers created the conditions for this, through interactive technology and selective listening.

Recent advancements in audio technology for computer games has made possible for implementations with binaural audio. Compared to regular stereo sound, binaural audio offers possibilities for a player to experience spatial sound, including sounds along the vertical plane, using their own headphones. A computer game prototype called “Crystal Gatherer” was created for this study to explore the possibilities of binaural audio imple- mentation regarding localization and perception of objects that make sound in a 3D game. The game featured two similar game levels, with the difference that one used binaural sound, and the other stereo sound. The levels consisted of a dark space that the player could navigate freely with the objective to find objects that make sound, called “crystals”, as fast as they could. An experiment was conducted with 14 test sub- jects that played the game, qualitative and quantitative data was collected, including the time the players took to complete the game levels, respectively, and answers about how they experienced the levels. A majority of test subjects reported that they per- ceived a difference between the levels. No significant difference was found between the levels in terms of efficacy of finding the objects that made sound. Some test subjects stated that they found localization was better in the binaural level of the game, others found the stereo level to be better in this respect. The study shows that there can exist possibilities for binaural audio to change the perception of audio in computer games.

Navigation systems are commonly used in our daily lives. Research has shown that spatial audio presents one opportunity for more effectively communicating to the driver the direction of the next manoeuvre. This thesis project proposes a new feature for the spatialisation of the audio cues triggered by a mobile navigation system by using a virtualised vector-based panning (VVBP) architecture for the encoding and decoding. The prototype developed during this thesis enables the spatialisation using headphones- or speakers- based systems. This study aims to promote a new sound experience to the user, which can be used to increase the safety and performance of driving. Based on an expert review and a user test, the application was tested on different scenarios. The participants selected during these sessions were part of HERE Technologies, which made possible to reach design experts who knew the current application provided by the company beforehand, making easier the comparison with the proposal. This selection could also present a limitation on the study since the users might have a personal bias for seeing new features in a product which have already worked on. Analysis of the results obtained during the testing session demonstrated high satisfaction with the feature by the users and a better understanding of their surroundings. Consequently, this indicates that spatial audio can improve the performance of driving by introducing a new source of information for positioning the next turn or obstacle. Further research is needed to identify other factors that could strengthen the effectiveness of the product. / Navigationssystem används ofta i våra dagliga liv. Forskning har visat att rumsligt ljud ger ett tillfälle att effektivare kommunicera till föraren i riktningen för nästa manöver. Detta avhandlingsprojekt föreslår en ny funktion för spatialisering av ljudkoder som utlöses av ett mobilnavigeringssystem med hjälp av en virtualiserad vektorbaserad panorering (VVBP) arkitektur för kodning och avkodning. Prototypen som utvecklats under denna avhandling möjliggör spatialisering med hörlurar eller högtalarbaserade system. Denna studie syftar till att främja en ny ljudupplevelse för användaren, som kan användas för att öka säkerheten och prestandan vid körning. Baserat på en expertgranskning och ett användartest testades applikationen på olika scenarier. Deltagarna som valdes ut under dessa sessioner var en del av HERE Technologies, som gjorde det möjligt att nå konstruktionsexperter som kände till den nuvarande applikationen från företaget i förväg, vilket underlättar jämförelsen med förslaget. Detta val kan också utgöra en begränsning av studien eftersom användarna kan ha en personlig fördom för att se nya funktioner i en produkt som redan har arbetat med. Analys av resultaten som erhölls under testperioden visade hög tillfredsställelse med funktionen hos användarna och en bättre förståelse för deras omgivning. Konsekvensen indikerar att rumsligt ljud kan förbättra körförmågan genom att införa en ny informationskälla för positionering av nästa sväng eller hinder. Ytterligare forskning behövs för att identifiera andra faktorer som kan stärka produktens effektivitet.