Dave Benson

McGill University | McGill · Schulich School of Music

Search interfaces for room impulse response libraries are critical to the operation of convolution reverb, a popular digital audio effect. Traditional designs for such interfaces, however, scale poorly to the large library sizes encountered in contemporary practice. This dissertation explores an emerging approach to search interface design with gre...

A study was undertaken to compare four different 9-channel three-dimensional acoustic music recording techniques, all optimized for capturing a solo piano. The four techniques range in design philosophy: spaced, near-coincident, and coincident. Results of a subjective listening test showed the two spaced techniques as being equally highly rated for...

Audio Production and Critical Listening: Technical Ear Training, Second Edition develops your critical and expert listening skills, enabling you to listen to audio like an award-winning engineer. Featuring an accessible writing style, this new edition includes information on objective measurements of sound, technical descriptions of signal processi...

An experiment was conducted to better understand first-person motion as perceived by a listener when moving between two virtual sound sources in an auditory virtual environment (AVE). It was hypothesized that audio simulations using binaural cross-fading between two separate sound source locations could represent a sensation of motion for the liste...

An ambient sound field created artificially using active acoustics (virtual acoustics) attempts to resurrect the perceived naturalness of the original architectural space and the distinct responsiveness to musical sound sources. Moving reverberation is typically associated with coupled volumes contained within a larger architectural space, where ea...

Impulse response measurements using log sine sweeps were made in the Warsaw's Chamber Opera House in 8 microphone locations on the floor area and at 2 locations on the balcony, with 2 microphone elevations, using 2 types of sound sources having different directional radiation characteristics. The Opera House having only 159 seats originates from 17...

The ease with which Impulse Response (IR) libraries can be searched is a principal determinant of the usability of a convolution reverberation system. Popular software packages for convolution reverb typically permit searching over metadata that describe how and where an IR was measured, but this "how and where" information often fails to adequatel...

In eight-channel surround sound reproduction, two of the channels are elevated above the listener and their signals are transformed to provide three listening conditions for the evaluation of spatial impression. The elevation channels are either unprocessed, convolved with a short impulse response of a dummy head, or convolved with a dummy head res...

The paper describes the processes of evaluation, selection and preparation of a large number of room impulse responses measured in architectural spaces that are used for music performance. Clusters of eight impulse responses previously recorded in different locations in each room are analyzed using objective and subjective methods to map their phys...

In virtual auditory display, sound source motion is typically cued through dynamic variations in two types of localization cues: the inter-aural time delay (ITD) and binaural spectral cues. Generally, both types of cues contribute to the perception of sound source motion. For certain spatial tra jectories, however, namely those lying on the surface...

Although many studies have attempted to identify spectral cues to sound‐source direction for the entire sphere of possible incidence angles, few studies have focused their attention on directional hearing for virtual sources positioned on cones of confusion. These regions of space, defined by relatively constant interaural time and intensity differ...