Title: Parametric Analysis of Ambisonic Audio: Contributions to methods, applications and data generation

Supervisors: Dr. Emilia Gómez and Dr. Adán Garriga (EURECAT)

Jury: Dr. Xavier Serra (UPF), Dr. Máximo Cobos (UPV) and Dr. Tuomas Virtanen (Tampere University)

Abstract: Due to the recent advances in virtual and augmented reality, ambisonics has emergedas  thede factostandard  for  immersive  audio.   Ambisonic  audio  can  be  captured  us-ing spherical microphone arrays, which are becoming increasingly popular as well.  Yet,many methods for acoustic and microphone array signal processing are not specificallytailored for spherical geometries.  Therefore, there is still room for improvements in thefield of automatic analysis and description of ambisonic recordings.  In the present the-sis, we tackle this problem using methods based on the parametric analysis of the soundfield.  Specifically, we present novel contributions in the scope of blind reverberation timeestimation, diffuseness estimation, and sound event localization and detection.  Further-more, several software tools developed for ambisonic dataset generation and managementare also presented.

Video: https://youtu.be/8oozqJHFnXA