Apl - Applied Psychoacoustics Laboratory
About Apl - Applied Psychoacoustics Laboratory
APL's research team aims to explore unknown psychoacoustic phenomena and develop new algorithms for next-generation music /audio technology applications.
Apl - Applied Psychoacoustics Laboratory Description
Applied Psychoacoustics Lab (APL) is a division of Music Technology and Production Research Group (MTPRG) at the University of Huddersfield, UK, focusing on the study of human auditory perception and its applications.
APL is led by Dr Hyunkook Lee, Senior Lecturer in Music Technology at SCE. Currently there are six PhD students and three Masters by Research students researching into various psychoacoustic topics.
Our current research focuses on the psychoacoustics of 3D multichannel audio, the development of new 3D sound processing techniques and the psychoacoustics of dynamic range compression - detailed information can be found in the official website below.
Reviews
The AES International Conference on Immersive and Interactive Audio in York (27-29 Mar) was an amazing event with so many interesting papers, workshops and demos of the latest research. It was a great pleasure for us to be part of the event. Callum Eaton presented a poster on the factors of auditory immersion, Chris Gribben and Hyunkook won the Best Paper Award for their paper on vertical interchannel decorrelation, and Dale Johnson announced the release of SOFA for Max. Hyunkook Lee served as Workshop Chair of the conference and delivered a tutorial/demo on VHAP 3D panning. The papers are available from the AES e-library: http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib= 20399 http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib= 20397 http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib= 20415
We are pleased to announce the release of the VHAP vst plugin. VHAP(Virtual Hemispherical Amplitude Panning) is a new algorithm for 3D panning in the upper-hemisphere "without" using physical height speakers. It requires only 4 ear-height loudspeakers arranged in a cross layout or 4 corresponding HRTF filters for binaural rendering. The working principle is purely psychoacoustic; there is no crosstalk cancellation or equalisation involved. It works based on a trade-off betwee...n interaural cues and the acoustic-crosstalk-related spectral notch cue for the "phantom image elevation effect".
The plugin can be freely downloaded from https://research.hud.ac.uk/institutes-cen tres/apl/resources/. A manual is not there yet, but it's quite straightforward to use it. You can download a Reaper session template for VHAP with some wav files (+ the presentation slides of VHAP workshop from the AES IIA conf) from https://drive.google.com/…/1kPcCPFlJUzV LlbzoxuBFudCE91do8MP…
For the Loudspeaker mode, make sure the speaker channel order is 1=Side Left, 2=Side Right, 3=Front, 4=Back. For the binaural mode, 1-2 obviously. The next version will support head-tracking and SOFA file for loading your own HRIRs.
VHAP can be also used for creating virtual height images in conventional 5.1 or 7.1 (e.g. Side left-Side right-Front: in this case panning is possible only in the frontal upper-hemisphere, a new paper for test results coming soon.)
For more details on the elevation effect and the plugin, please refer to the papers below. http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib= 19482 http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib= 20356 http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib= 19203
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The 146th AES convention in Dublin was another successful AES event for the APL, full of interesting discussions and networking. Click on each photo for links to the papers, software and database we presented.