Contents of a graduate level course in spatial sound and 3-D audio

In the spring of 2014 the authors led a graduate-level course in spatial sound and 3-D audio at the Pennsylvania State University through the Graduate Program in Acoustics. Presented simultaneously to students in a classroom and at a distance via Adobe Connect, the aim was to provide a comprehensive overview of topics in virtual acoustics to individuals already having some background in the fundamentals of acoustics. The intent of the current paper is to describe the contents of that course, inviting the comments of others. In addition to the core topics of binaural hearing, spatial hearing, head related transfer functions (HRTFs), auralization, and crosstalk-cancellation, the spring 2014 course also provided introductions to synthetic reverberation, auditory inputs, Ambisonics, commercial multichannel approaches, wave field synthesis, auditory visual environments, room acoustics, and the latest results on the neural imaging of humans hearing 3-D sound. The students completed homework sets including listening to the stereo-dipole demonstrations (developed at ISVR, Southampton Univ.), testing the individualization of HRTFs, room acoustics and binaural simulations, and binaural simulation using the SFS toolbox (developed at TU Berlin). In addition, the students also completed a midterm exam, a term paper, and a project using the ODEON room acoustics software. Many references were used, including numerous journal articles and chapters from handbooks of acoustics. The course drew heavily from both the older D. Begault's 3-D Sound (1994) and the newer B. Xie's Head-Related Transfer Function and Virtual Auditory Display, 2nd Ed. (2013). Brief audio examples were provided throughout the semester to add an aural dimension to the lectures.