Biography

Laurent graduated with a Master's degree in Acoustics, Signal Processing and Computer Science applied to Music at IRCAM, Paris, France and in an engineering school's Master of Signal Processing at ESIEE, Noisy-le-Grand, France. In October 2007 Laurent started an EPSRC-funded Ph.D. on Perceptual Sound Field Reconstruction and Coherent Emulation in collaboration with Kings College, University of London.

He plays percussion in Trenk, a celtic band, and classical piano in his spare time.

Publications

Laurent Simon, Russel Mason, Francis Rumsey: "Localisation Curves for a Regularly-spaced Octagon Loudspeaker Array", presented at the 127th AES convention in New York, 2009

Laurent Simon, Russell Mason: "Time and Level Localisation Curves For A Regularly-Spaced Octagon Loudspeaker Array", presented at the 128th AES convention in London, 2010

Research Project

Perceptual Sound Field Reconstruction and Coherent Emulation

Laurent Simon
Francis Rumsey
Russell Mason

Despite the progress 5.1 surround sound represented compared to stereophony, it has proved insufficient for full 360° foreground content recording. On the other hand, systems like Higher Order Ambisonics and Wave Field Synthesis, which aim at reconstructing a physically accurate sound field over an extended area, are often highly complex and require a large number of loudspeakers.

This project investigates the use of microphone arrays to enable a perceptually convincing reconstruction of an acoustical sound field using an 8-speaker system - which could be considered as being in the engineering 'gap' between traditional stereophony and recent sound field reconstruction techniques. By capturing separately the direct and the diffuse sound field with separate microphone arrays, one may be able to perceptually optimise the arrays for each task. Although the use of simple arrays might not lead to a physically correct sound field, the perceptual result might still be consistent. Such a system remains in accord with sound engineers' habits, where one often uses a microphone array for diffuse sound and spot microphones for direct sound, and rarely aims for acoustically accurate sound field representation.

Early work on this project included a comparison between the VBAP localization capabilities of the 5.1 ITU-R BSS.75 loudspeaker setup and the octagon loudspeaker setup used in this project and  the measurement of localization and locatedness curves using Interchannel Time and Level Differences (ICTD and ICLD) on each of the sides of the octagon loudspeaker array.