AES Activity

You might have missed some important news within the last year: The AES standards are now FREE! So there’s no longer the excuse that it costs too much to know what the standards are. As the Web site says, “Single copies of AES standards in PDF form may be downloaded without charge from this Web page: http://ftp.aessc.org/aes-standards-in-print.html.”
This issue of Surround Professional is being prepared just days before the Audio Engineering Society convention, which is to be held in Los Angeles from October 5–8. Preceding it by two days are standards meetings as well (www.aes.org/standards/ meetings/AES113_meet_schedule.
cfm). While just a few years ago surround information was relegated to very narrow areas, such as one workshop per year or a handful of papers, the importance of surround sound to the industry can be seen in the large number and wide variety of surround activities at this year’s convention. Here is a digest of the workshops, papers, and events most relevant for surround sound. [Editor’s note: If you can’t be there, tapes of the workshops will be available through the AES after the convention.]

Saturday, October 5
9:00 am – 11:00 am
W1: STEREO AND SURROUND
MICROPHONE TECHNIQUES (Tutorial)
Chair: Geoff Martin, Bang & Olufsen New Business A/S, Acoustics Research
Panelists: Michael Bishop, Head of Engineering, Telarc International; Bruce Botnick, Independent Engineer/Producer; John Eargle, JME/JBL Professional; Richard King, Senior Recording Engineer, Sony Music Studios; Mick Sawaguchi, NHK Broadcasting Center, Programme Production Operations, Sound Division
Summary: Issues to be discussed include the characteristics of various microphone configurations as well as upwards-and-downwards compatibility considerations. Produced by the AES Education Committee.

2:00 pm – 5:00 pm
W3: WHAT AUDIO ENGINEERS SHOULD KNOW ABOUT HUMAN SOUND PERCEPTION (Tutorial)
Presenters: Durand Begault, NASA Ames Research Center, USA; William Martens, University of Aizu, Aizu-Wakematsu, Japan
Summary: Audio engineering professionals are intimately familiar with the art of producing acoustical phenomena to achieve specific psychoacoustic goals for applications such as music, multimedia, speech reinforcement, etc. However, they may be less familiar with the underlying mechanisms of hearing and perception that influence their everyday decisions.
This tutorial will review fundamental concepts of human sound perception, first from monaural hearing perspective, and then from a spatial hearing perspective. Topics will include pitch, loudness, timbre, sensitivity to phase; temporal resolution and temporal integration; masking; spatial perception; the perceptual effects of rooms; and differences between headphone and loudspeaker reproduction.

Sunday, October 6
9:00 am – 12:00 noon
W5: MIXING AND MASTERING IN
MULTICHANNEL SURROUND (Tutorial)
Chair: Michael Bishop, Head of Engineering, Telarc International
Panelists: John Eargle, JME/JBL Professional; Frank Filipetti, Independent Engineer/Producer; Bob Ludwig, President/Owner, Gateway Mastering & DVD; George Massenburg, President/Owner, GML, LLC; Elliott Scheiner, Independent Engineer/Producer
Summary: Topics such as comparisons of various loudspeaker configurations, mastering techniques for DVD-Audio and SACD, and new mixing techniques required for surround will be addressed. Produced by the AES Education Committee.

12:10 pm – 1:10 pm
AES Technical Committee Meetings
TC ON MULTICHANNEL AND
BINAURAL AUDIO

2:00 pm – 6:00 pm
SESSION G: MULTICHANNEL SOUND
G-1 Interchannel Interference at the Listening Position in a Five-Channel Loudspeaker Configuration—Geoff Martin, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, and Bang & Olufsen a/s, Struer, Denmark
G-2 Breaking and Making the Rules: Sound Design in 6.1—Ambrose Field, University of York, York, UK
G-3 Localization of Lateral Phantom Images in a 5-Channel System With and Without Simulated Early Reflections—Jason Corey, Wieslaw Woszczyk, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
G-4 The Minimum Number of Loudspeakers and its Arrangement for Reproducing the Spatial Impression of Diffuse Sound Field—Koichiro Hiyama, Setsu Komiyama, Kimio Hamasaki, NHK, Setagaya, Tokyo, Japan
G-5 A Fuzzy Cerebellar Model Approach for Synthesizing Multichannel Recordings—Ching-Shun Lin, Chris Kyriakakis, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
G-6 Investigation of Listener Envelopment in Multichannel Surround Systems—Gilbert A. Soulodre, Michel C. Lavoie, Scott G. Norcross, Communications Research Centre, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
G-7 The Significance of Interchannel Correlation, Phase and Amplitude Differences on Multichannel Microphone Techniques—Geoff Martin, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, and Bang & Olufsen a/s, Struer, Denmark
G-8 A Multichannel Surround Audio Format Applying 3D Sound Technology—Myung-Soo Kang, Kyoo-Nyun Kim, University of Ulsan, Ulsan, Korea

2:00 pm – 4:30 pm
SESSION H: LOW BIT-RATE CODING, PART 1
H-2 Lossless Audio Coding Using Adaptive Multichannel Prediction—Tilman Liebchen, Technical University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany

2:30 pm – 5:00 pm
“AN AFTERNOON WITH …….. TOM HOLMAN”
Moderator: George Petersen, Editorial Director of Mix Magazine

Monday, October 7
9:00 am – 12:00 noon
SESSION I: LOW BIT-RATE CODING, PART 2
I-3 Binaural Cue Coding Applied to Audio Compression with Flexible Rendering—Christof Faller, Frank Baumgarte, Agere Systems, Murray Hill, NJ, USA

9:00 am – 11:00 am
SESSION J: HIGH RESOLUTION AUDIO
J-1 DSD Processing Modules—Architecture and Application—Nathan Bentall, Gary Cook, Peter Eastty, Eamon Hughes, Michael Page, Chris Sleight, Mike Smith, Sony Broadcast & Professional Research Labs, Oxford, UK
J-2 Multichannel Audio Connection for Direct Stream Digital—Michael Page, Nathan Bentall, Gary Cook, Peter Eastty, Eamon Hughes, Christopher Sleight, Sony Broadcast & Professional Research Labs, Oxford, UK

2:00 pm – 4:30 pm
SESSION L: AUDIO NETWORKING AND
AUTOMOTIVE AUDIO
L-3 Mutually-Immersive Audio Telepresence—Norman P. Jouppi, HP Labs, Palo Alto, CA, USA; Michael J. Pan, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, USA
L-4 Assessment of Soundfield in a Car—Chulmin Choi, Lae-Hoon Kim, Koeng-Mo Sung, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea; Sejin Doo, Dong-Ah Broadcasting College, Ansung, Korea; Yangki Oh, Mokpo National University, Mokpo, Korea

Tuesday, October 8
9:00 am – 12:00 noon
W14: THE APPLICATION OF MULTICHANNEL SOUND FORMATS IN VEHICLES
Chair: Richard Stroud
Panelists: David Clark; Neal House; Mark Ziemba
Summary: Workshop presenters will discuss vehicular multichannel audio installation design goals, system development, available source material, recording considerations, and evaluation methodologies.

9:00 am – 12:00 noon
SESSION M: PSYCHOACOUSTICS, PART 1
M-1 Comparison of Objective Measures of Loudness Using Audio Program Material—Eric Benjamin, Dolby Laboratories, San Francisco, CA, USA

1:00 pm – 4:00 pm
W15: CODING OF SPATIAL AUDIO –
YESTERDAY, TODAY, TOMORROW
Chair: Christof Faller, Agere Systems, Murray Hill, NJ
Panelists: Frank Baumgarte, Agere Systems, Murray Hill, NJ; Mark Davis, Dolby, San Francisco, CA, USA; Martin Dietz, Coding Technologies, Nürnberg, Germany; Gerald Schuller, Fraunhofer Institute, Ilmenau, Germany; Thomas Sporer, Fraunhofer AEMT, Ilmenau, Germany
Summary: This workshop offers a review of the principles and practical approaches for coding of spatial audio, discusses the different dimensions of the trade-off “bit-rate vs. spatial quality,” and characterizes commonly used coders with respect to these aspects.

1:00 pm – 4:00 pm
SESSION N: PSYCHOACOUSTICS, PART 2
N-4 The Use of Head-and-Torso Models for Improved Spatial Sound Synthesis—V. Ralph Algazi, Richard O. Duda, Dennis M. Thompson, University of California, Davis, CA, USA
N-5 Three-Dimensional Headphone Sound Reproduction Based on Active Noise Cancellation—Daniël Schobben, Ronald Aarts, Philips Research Labortories, Eindhoven, The Netherlands
N-6 On the Design of Canonical Sound Localization Environments—Eric J. Angel, Ralph Algazi, Richard O. Duda, University of California, Davis, CA,