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Aalto Acoustics Lab wrote the best paper of the year in an audio journal

Published: 3.6.2020

The paper introduces a novel audio reverberation method

Aalto University/ Acoustics Lab research group — Benoit Alary (left), Archontis Politis, Sebastian J. Schlecht and Vesa Välimäki.

The annual best paper award of the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society was handed virtually to Aalto University researchers during the spring Convention of the Audio Engineering Society in Vienna, Austria on Tuesday, 2 June 2020. The research article published in 2019 details a framework to create 3-D artificial reverberation.

For this research paper, Mr. Benoit Alary, a doctoral candidate at the Aalto Acoustics Lab, collaborated with Dr. Archontis Politis, a former Aalto researcher who is now a postdoc researcher at Tampere University, along with Professor of Practice Sebastian J. Schlecht and Professor Vesa Välimäki, both also from the Acoustics Lab. Prior to becoming a doctoral student of acoustics at Aalto University, Benoit Alary worked in computer gaming industry developing interactive sound technology and virtual acoustics algorithms. Benoit’s doctoral work is part of an Academy of Finland project aiming to improve the reproduction of concerts at home by immersive technologies.

The best paper award, Audio Engineering society

The Journal of the Audio Engineering Society is exclusively dedicated to audio technology and has a long tradition in publishing pioneering results in the field of audio signal processing, such as artificial reverberation, sound reproduction, and digital sound synthesis. The award-winning Open Access paper entitled Directional feedback delay network introduces a novel audio reverberation method capable of producing non-uniform decaying reverberations in different directions around a listener. These directional sound characteristics may be experienced in well varied spaces such as meeting rooms, churches, and concert halls. Previously, reverberation methods could only yield the same decay of sound in every direction and did not correctly reproduce such directional aspects. The novel method is a useful addition to the toolbox of spatial audio technologies, bringing immersive sounds to virtual and augmented reality, which would otherwise sound like traditional static movies.