International Conference Applications of Time – Frequency Processing in Audio

CONFERENCE REPORT The AES 45th International Conference, Applications of Time– Frequency Processing in Audio, continued the series—16th, 22nd, and 30th—of AES conferences organized by the AES Finnish Section. About 80 audio researchers were gathered at the Dipoli Congress Center in Espoo, which is located in the Helsinki capitol area. The venue has a unique architecture designed by Reima and Raili Pietilä, incorporating excellent facilities for a truly international conference, just next door from Aalto University (formerly known as Helsinki University of Technology). In his opening remarks, Ville Pulkki, conference chair, began the discussions by observing that all audio processing is performed in time and frequency. Indeed, this was a good starting point for a wide variety of 30 oral and 10 poster presentations, selected by papers chair Ville Sivonen. The conference program also included four invited presentations and a good selection of academic spatial sound demonstrations. The technical program, organized by Tapio Lokki, was offered together with a sporty outdoor event and cozy social program in the evenings. The conference opened on Thursday afternoon, 1 March, with academic demonstrations at the facilities of the Department of Signal Processing and Acoustics at Aalto University. Delegates had an opportunity to visit three anechoic rooms, one fascinating audiovisual room, and a standard listening room to get an inside view on the work done at the university. Tapani Pihlajamäki showed how Bformat recordings can be projected onto virtual 3-D surfaces. The system enables interactive walk-throughs “inside” spatial sound recordings. Jussi Rämö presented a real-time perceptual frequency response simulator for music in varying background noises. In an audio-visual system, consisting of three large back-projected screens and 29 loudspeakers, Olli Rummukainen played real audiovisual recordings. The visuals were captured with a commercial Ladybug-3 video camera and spatial sound was captured with an Aformat Soundfield SPS200 microphone. The spatial sound rendering was performed with directional audio coding (DirAC) to the Ville Pulkki, conference chair, opens the event.