Communication Acoustics

Fundamental knowledge and understanding in the covered areas of fundamentals of acoustics, sound propagation, audio technology, sound production, speech processing, psychoacoustics and communication acoustics. Ability to individually solve problems in communication acoustics.

1. Fundamentals of acoustics (Müller, Vorländer)
1.1 sound field quantities, wave equation
1.2 plane waves / spherical waves
1.3 energy/intensity, decibel
1.4 sound sources: voice / musical instruments / noise
1.5 sound reflection, absorption, diffraction
1.6 statistical room acoustics, reverberation

2. Fundamentals of signals and systems (Ahrens)
2.1 Complex notation, harmonic signals
2.2 Fourier series, Fourier transformation, time and frequency domain (DFT, FFT)
2.3 LTI systems, impulse response and transfer function
2.4 Digital filters
2.5 Short introduction to non-linear systems

3. Anatomy and physiology of the hearing system (Fels)
3.1 Peripheral auditory system
3.2 Physical binaural cues and binaural hearing
3.3 Fundamentals of binaural technology
3.4 Reproduction of binaural recordings

4. Psychoacoustics (Seeber)
4.1 Hearing threshold
4.2 Auditory masking
4.3 Auditory frequency selectivity and critical bands
4.4 Loudness of sounds
4.5 Pitch, pitch strength, and timbre
4.6 Sharpness
4.7 Fluctuation strength and roughness
4.8 Binaural unmasking for speech understanding
4.9 Psychoacoustic methods

5. Electroacoustics (Altinsoy)
5.1 Introduction to electroacoustical systems and transmission
5.2 Electromechanical and electroacoustical analogies
5.3 Amplitude frequency response, harmonic distortion, intermodulation distortion, noise level and signal-to-noise ration
5.4 Transducer principles
5.5 Microphones
5.6 Loudspeakers
5.7 Headphones and earphones

6. Speech acoustics (Möller)
6.1 Anatomy of the human speech production system
6.2 Excitation
6.3 Sound shaping
6.4 Speech signal characteristics
6.5 Speech sounds
6.6 Models of speech production
6.7 Speech signal analysis
6.8 Speech intelligibility

7. Sound recording and reproduction (Weinzierl)
7.1 The psychoacoustics of stereophonic reproduction
7.2 Reproduction formats: From 1.0 to 24.1.10
7.3 Recording techniques
7.4 Channel-oriented vs. object-oriented spatial audio coding

8. Virtual acoustics I: Binaural technology (Weinzierl)
8.1 The concept of binaural recording and reproduction
8.2 Recording and playback devices
8.3 Dynamic binaural synthesis and re-synthesis
8.4 On the quality of virtual acoustic environments

9. Virtual acoustics II: Sound field analysis and synthesis (Ahrens)
spatial rendering: loudspeaker arrays;
spatial capture: microphone arrays, beamforming

10. Application Room Acoustics 1 (Müller)
Geometrical acoustics, impulse responses, perception (ISO 3382 parameters),
examples of performance spaces and classrooms

11. Application Room Acoustics 2 (Vorländer)
11.1 Room impulse response, image source model
11.2 Ray Tracing model
11.3 Wave models, hybrid geom/wave models
11.4 Input data,: sources and boundary conditions, precision
11.5 Auralization and Virtual Acoustics
11.6 Interfaces to 3D audio

12. Application Automatic Speech Recognition (Möller)
Principle of speech recognition, architecture of a speech recognizer, feature extraction, Hidden Markov Models, language models

13. Application Text-to-Speech Synthesis (Möller)
Historic approaches, structure of a speech synthesizer, symbolic preprocessing, prosody generation, signal generation approaches: parametric, concatenative, unit-selection synthesis

14. Application of Psychoacoustics in Product Development (Altinsoy)

15. Product Sound Design (Altinsoy)

16. Application: Perceptual Audio Coding (Ahrens) (mp3)