Surrounded by Sound: The 109th Convention of the Audio Engineering Society (review)

Surrounded by Sound: The 109^th Convention of the Audio Engineering Society. Los Angeles, California, USA, 22-25 September 2000.

The twice-yearly Conventions of the Audio Engineering Society (AES) are massive events. The autumn gatherings alternate between Los Angeles and New York, with spring-times in Paris, Amsterdam, or Munich. Audio engineers of all manner of specialization from all over the world flock to these affairs, and the Fall 2000 event, held at the Los Angeles Convention Center, was no exception. Perhaps it was the Wild West Party at the Gene Autry Museum of Western Heritage that drew the crowds. Perhaps it was the huge collection of exhibitors displaying their latest and greatest wares. Whatever the reasons, the AES Convention is always worthy of attention.

For this event, there were 16 paper sessions, 14 workshops, 13 technical committee meetings, 12 educational events, and a host of special events. In addition, the Exhibitors Hall was packed full of new and updated products from practically any manufacturer you can think of. Given the theme of the convention, "Surrounded by Sound," I will focus on the products and research that are relevant to multichannel audio.

Research

Surround sound is by no means a done deal, to judge from the research being presented at the AES. There were two paper sessions on Perception and Psychoacoustics, with reports on research relating to issues of Head-Related Transfer Functions (HRTF), among other topics. This research included "Perceptual Soundfield Reconstruction" by James D. Johnston (AT&T Research Labs, USA) and Yin Hay Lam (University of Strathclyde, UK), "Spatial Acoustic Mode Shapes of the Human Pinna" by Yuvi Kahana and Philip A. Nelson (University of Southampton, UK), "Robustness of Acoustic Crosstalk Cancellation as a Function of Frequency and Loudspeaker Separation" by Felipe Orduña (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico, Mexico), Jóse Javier López and Alberto González (Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Spain), and "Immersive Sound Rendering Using Laser-Based Tracking" by Panayiotis G. Georgiou, Athanasios Mouchtaris, Stergio I. Roumeliotis, and Chris Kyriakakis (University of Southern California, USA). Other interesting perceptual topics included "Magnitude Estimation of Sound Source Speed" by Mark A. Ericson (Air Force Research Laboratory, USA), "Correlation between Emotive, Descriptive and Naturalness Attributes in Subjective Data Relating to Spatial Sound Reproduction" by Jan Berg (Lulea University of Technology, Sweden) and Francis Rumsey (University of Surrey, UK), and "Psychoacoustic Models and Non-Linear Human Hearing" by David J. M. Robinson and Malcolm O. J. Hawksford (University of Essex, UK).

Some of the other research relating to multichannel audio included "On-the-Fly Multitrack Mixing" by François Pachet and Oliver Delarue (Sony Computer Science Laboratory, France), and "Interactive Multichannel Sound Reproduction Linked with VRML Graphics" by Setsu Komiyama, Hiroyuki Okubo, Kazuho Ono, and Koichiro Hiyama (NHK Science and Technical Research Laboratories, Japan) and Hiroshi Asayama (Timeware Corporation, Japan).

A couple of the workshops also took on aspects of multichannel audio. Tomlinson Holman, of THX fame, led an animated discussion on "How Many Loudspeaker Channels Are Enough?" Electroacoustic composers working in "acousmatic" environments may have had some pertinent comments to add, though unfortunately none had been invited to participate. For example, sitting in on two of the multichannel presentations at the convention, held in rather large halls, it was clear to my ears, sitting toward the perimeter of the sound-fields, that five or six loudspeaker sets are not enough to fill in echoes of transient sounds present in more than one channel of the mix. One of the Special Events was a workshop on "Mixing 5.1 Surround Live," led by Ron Streicher of Pacific Audio-Visual Enterprises. The issues focused on basic principles for mixing the audio "on the fly," when there are no opportunities for re-takes. There was also a workshop on "Multichannel Audio Production for DTV [Digital Television]," a field that is beginning to see increased activity in some of the network studios...