Humans probably evolved directional hearing as a survival technique for avoiding predators, or as an aid in hunting animals for food. While today we rarely use it for those purposes it is still vital for awareness of our surroundings, and thanks to surround-sound technologies such as Ambisonics and Dolby Digital we increasingly use it for entertainment.

The most convincing method for reproducing a spatial soundscape may well be binaural audio. Instead of attempting to recreate the sound field with multiple speakers, binaural reproduction feeds a single channel of sound to each ear, relying on reproducing the directional cues that we hear in everyday life to locate sources of sound.

This project is part of an established research program in the Intelligent Systems Design group at York. The program as a whole aims to speed adoptation of binaural audio by allowing variations in the shape of people's heads to be easily measured, and the effects of those variations calculated and applied to binaural reproduction systems, to increase spatialisation quality.

The role of this project is to aid in analysing the data produced by current work in the research group by visualising how changes in head-shape affect our directional hearing mechanisms.

The process used to measure and analyse head-shapes is described in the detail section, with a short review of existing literature relating to the project in the research section. Details of work done so far can be found on the progress page, and an outline of the remainder of the project is under future.

Contact: Lewis Saunders ls156@york.ac.uk
First supervisor: Tony Tew ait@ohm.york.ac.uk
Second supervisor: Adar Pelah ap23@ohm.york.ac.uk