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Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MSP.2014.2372062

Date of publication: 12 February 2015

ith the strong growth of assistive and per-

sonal listening devices, natural sound ren-

dering over headphones is becoming a

necessity for prolonged listening in multime-

dia and virtual reality applications. The aim of

natural sound rendering is to naturally recreate the sound scenes

with the spatial and timbral quality as natural as possible, so as to

achieve a truly immersive listening experience. However, render-

ing natural sound over headphones encounters many challenges.

This tutorial article presents signal processing techniques to

tackle these challenges to assist human listening.

INTRODUCTION

Sound is an inherent part of our everyday lives for information,

communication, and interaction. Sound improves situational

awareness by providing feedback for actions and situations that

are out of the view of the listener. An advantage of sound is that

multiple sound sources can be perceived from any location

around the head in the three-dimensional (3-D) space [1]. The role

of natural 3-D sound, or spatial sound, in high-stress applications,

like flight navigation and communication systems, is indisputable

[1]. Naturally rendered sound has also been proven to be beneficial

in personal route guidance for visually impaired people and in

medical therapy for patients [1]. Last but not least, the ever-grow-

ing market of consumer electronics calls for natural sound ren-

dering for digital media, such as movies, games, and augmented,

virtual reality applications like teleconferencing.

In most of these applications, listening is seldom from the phys-

ical sound sources but is instead from playback devices, such as

headphones or loudspeakers. Headphones, by virtue of their conve-

nience and portability, are typically chosen as the preferred play-

back device, especially for personal listening. Therefore, to assist

headphone listening, it is critical for the sound to be rendered in a

way that listeners can perceive it as natural as possible. In this con-

text, natural sound rendering essentially refers to rendering of the

original sound scene using headphones to create an immersive lis-

tening experience and the sensation of “being there” at the venue of

the acoustic event. To achieve natural sound rendering, the virtual

sound rendered should exactly emulate all the spatial cues of the

EARPHONES—IMAGE LICENSED BY INGRAM PUBLISHING

[

Kaushik Sunder, Jianjun He, Ee-Leng Tan, and Woon-Seng Gan

]

[

Integration of signal processing techniques

]

Natural Sound Rendering

for Headphones

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