The control of diffuseness of sound is a tool for the sound designer to synthesize surrounding sound from a monophonic signal in virtual-world audio. Virtual-world Directional Audio Coding offers this with a specific diffuseness parameter. However, the diffuseness parameter value measured from sound recordings often has spurious short-term fluctuations which have to be synthesized to obtain natural reproduction. This data is not readily available when upmixing a monophonic signal into a multi-channel setup. In this paper, a method is proposed for estimating the fluctuation of diffuseness parameter from a monophonic signal and synthesizing a multi-channel output based on it. This algorithm is based on the estimation of the reverberant energy in a signal. A formal listening test was performed to compare the relative quality of the proposed method to constant diffuseness cases. The results show that the proposed method increases the perceptual quality of the synthesis.

Authors: Pihlajamäki, Tapani; Laitinen, Mikko-Ville
Affiliation: Aalto University School of Electrical Engineering, Espoo, Finland
AES Conference: 49th International Conference: Audio for Games (February 2013)
Paper Number: P-4
Publication Date: February 6, 2013
Subject: Posters

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