Virtual Microphones for Multichannel Audio Resynthesis
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Virtual Microphones for Multichannel Audio Resynthesis Athanasios Mouchtaris Electrical Engineering Systems Department, Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC), University of Southern California, 3740 McClintock Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90089-2564, USA Email: [email protected]
Shrikanth S. Narayanan Electrical Engineering Systems Department, Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC), University of Southern California, 3740 McClintock Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90089-2564, USA Email: [email protected]
Chris Kyriakakis Electrical Engineering Systems Department, Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC), University of Southern California, 3740 McClintock Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90089-2564, USA Email: [email protected] Received 30 May 2002 and in revised form 17 February 2003 Multichannel audio offers significant advantages for music reproduction, including the ability to provide better localization and envelopment, as well as reduced imaging distortion. On the other hand, multichannel audio is a demanding media type in terms of transmission requirements. Often, bandwidth limitations prohibit transmission of multiple audio channels. In such cases, an alternative is to transmit only one or two reference channels and recreate the rest of the channels at the receiving end. Here, we propose a system capable of synthesizing the required signals from a smaller set of signals recorded in a particular venue. These synthesized “virtual” microphone signals can be used to produce multichannel recordings that accurately capture the acoustics of that venue. Applications of the proposed system include transmission of multichannel audio over the current Internet infrastructure and, as an extension of the methods proposed here, remastering existing monophonic and stereophonic recordings for multichannel rendering. Keywords and phrases: multichannel audio, Gaussian mixture model, distortion measures, virtual microphones, audio resynthesis, multiresolution analysis.
1.
INTRODUCTION
Multichannel audio can enhance the sense of immersion for a group of listeners by reproducing the sounds that would originate from several directions around the listeners, thus simulating the way we perceive sound in a real acoustical space. On the other hand, multichannel audio is one of the most demanding media types in terms of transmission requirements. A novel architecture allowing delivery of uncompressed multichannel audio over high-bandwidth communications networks was presented in [1]. As suggested there, for applications in which bandwidth limitations prohibit transmission of multiple audio channels, an alternative would be to transmit only one or two channels (denoted as reference channels or recordings in this work, for example, the left and right signals in a traditional stereo recording)
and reconstruct the remaining channels at the receiving end. The system proposed in this paper provides a solution for reconstructing the channels of a specific recording from the reference channels and is particularly suitable for live concert hall performances.
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