Creating the Sydney York Morphological and Acoustic Recordings of Ears Database

This paper introduces the process for creating the Sydney York Morphological and Acoustic Recordings of Ears (SYMARE) database. The SYMARE database supports research exploring the relationship between the morphology of human outer ears and their acoustic filtering properties-a relationship that is viewed by many as holding the key to human spatial hearing and the future of 3D personal audio. The SYMARE database is comprised of acoustically measured head-related impulse responses for 61 listeners (48 male/13 female), multiple high-resolution surface mesh models (upper torso, head and ears) for these listeners obtained from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data, and the corresponding simulated HRIR data for these listeners generated using the Fast Multipole Boundary Element Method (FM-BEM). In this work, we compare acoustically measured HRIR data for 61 listeners with the listeners' corresponding simulated HRIR data generated using the FM-BEM.

[1]  Gregory S. Chirikjian,et al.  Rotational Matching Problems , 2004, Int. J. Comput. Intell. Appl..

[2]  Piotr Majdak,et al.  Fast multipole boundary element method to calculate head-related transfer functions for a wide frequency range. , 2009, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[3]  H. A. Schenck.  Improved Integral Formulation for Acoustic Radiation Problems , 1968 .

[4]  Ramani Duraiswami,et al.  A broadband fast multipole accelerated boundary element method for the three dimensional Helmholtz equation. , 2009, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[5]  D. M. Green,et al.  Directional sensitivity of sound-pressure levels in the human ear canal. , 1989, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[6]  P. Guillon.  Individualisation des indices spectraux pour la synthèse binaurale : recherche et exploitation des similarités inter-individuelles pour l’adaptation ou la reconstruction de HRTF , 2009 .

[7]  Jyri Huopaniemi.  Future of Personal Audio: Smart Applications and Immersive Communication , 2007 .

[8]  J. C. Middlebrooks,et al.  Individual differences in external-ear transfer functions reduced by scaling in frequency. , 1999, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[9]  Michael Friis Sørensen,et al.  Head-Related Transfer Functions of Human Subjects , 1995 .

[10]  V R Algazi,et al.  Elevation localization and head-related transfer function analysis at low frequencies. , 2001, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[11]  Jean-Marc Jot,et al.  Approaches to Binaural Synthesis , 1998 .

[12]  D Pralong,et al.  The role of individualized headphone calibration for the generation of high fidelity virtual auditory space. , 1996, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[13]  Gregory H. Wakefield,et al.  Spatial frequency response surfaces: an alternative visualization tool for head-related transfer functions (HRTFs) , 1999, 1999 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing. Proceedings. ICASSP99 (Cat. No.99CH36258).

[14]  Simon Carlile,et al.  Generation and Applications of Virtual Auditory Space , 1996 .