Students

We are hiring a Master thesis worker for the science-art project ‘R,’ which revolves around co-evolution between humans, animals, and technical agents. The acoustic niche hypothesis states that all agents in a shared acoustic ecology evolve to divide the sonic spectrum to allow effective intra-species communication.

We often rely on our audition when evaluating object motion, like, for example, the velocity of an approaching car. Can acoustic cues provide us with information about our motion, real or illusory? While visually-induced illusory self-motion (termed vection) has been extensively studied over more than a century, research on auditory vection cues has received only minor attention. This project aims to re-create sound examples and experimental setups for auditorily-induced vection, i.e., perception of self-motion based on existing literature. The project benefits from understanding auditory perception and VR and sound design for immersive setups such as binaural and multichannel setups.

Goal

Create photogrammetric scans of AcousticsLab facilities (10-15 rooms) in Otaniemi, Espoo.

Work packages

• Make scans of the rooms with iPad
• Clean up scans with 3D modeling software, e.g., Blender
• Create VR-ready version: smoothing, decimation, re-texturing

Hardware

iPad Pro 2020 with LIDAR scanner

The same Ambisonics music can sound very different under different acoustic conditions. Specifically, it has been observed that many pieces sound better in slightly more reverberant rooms than in completely dry reproduction. This work aims to assess Ambisonics playback in different rooms, also using the variable acoustics chamber at the Aalto Acoustics Lab.

Reverberation in rooms is often thought to evolve towards Gaussian noise gradually. This transition from distinct early reflection to dense late reverberation is a critical metric for characterizing the sound of a room. Various ad-hoc measures have been proposed to quantify these transitions. This work aims to use classic statistical normality tests and energy compensation techniques to evaluate robust approaches for echo density measures.