Binaural Capture and Synthesis of Ambient Soundscapes

Advanced Acoustic Concepts (AAC) will develop a reliable, validated, and fully documented system for digitally recording ambient soundscapes and resynthesize the desired soundscape for binaural presentation to human listeners via headphones. The system will take advantage of the established acoustical signal processing technology of AAC and the state-of-the-art psychoacoustics research and audio recording and processing expertise of Montana State University and Dr. Rob Maher. The system proposed by AAC will exploit the directional recording capability of the microphone array through the process of beamforming. The system will also be able to reproduce a given soundscape based on known parameters using a database of existing auditory environments and statistical models. This will allow the system to reproduce a variety of different listening environments to fit particular user applications.