Headphone-based Spatial Sound with a GPU Accelerator

Multichannel acoustic signal processing has undergone major development in recent years. The incorporation of spatial information into an immersive audiovisual virtual environment or into video games provides better sense of “presence” to applications. Spatial sound consists in reproducing audio signals with spatial cues (spatial information embedded in the sound) through headphones. This spatial information allows the listener to identify the virtual positions of the sources corresponding to different sounds. Headphone-based spatial sound is obtained by filtering different sound sources through special filters called Head Related Transfer Functions (HRTFs) prior to render them through headphones. Efficient computation plays an important role when the number of sources to be managed is high. This situation increases the number of filtering operations, requiring high computing capacity specially when the virtual sources are moving. Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) are high parallel programmable co-processors that provide massive computation when the needed operations are properly parallelized. This paper discusses the design, the implementation and the performance of a headphone-based spatial audio application whose processing is totally carried out on a GPU. This application is able to interact with the listener who can select and change the location of the sound sources in real-time. This work analyzes also specific computational aspects inside the CUDA environment in order to successfully exploit GPU resources. Results show that the proposed application is able to move up to 2500 sources simultaneously, while leaving free CPU resources for other tasks. This work emphasizes the importance of analyzing all CUDA aspects, since they can influence drastically the performance.