Perception of auditory objects in complex scenes: factors and applications

Over the past twenty years, technological advances have driven the development of media consumption in both home and mobile contexts. While not ubiquitous, multi-channel audio home cinema systems have become more prevalent, as has the consumption of broadcast and gaming media on smartphone and tablet technology via mobile telecommunications networks. This has created new possibilities and poses new challenges for audio content delivery such as how the same content can be presented to greatest effect given that it may be consumed via either a surround-sound home entertainment system or in a mobile context using stereo headphones. This paper outlines research into the development of strategies to optimise audio delivery for broadcast, gaming and music content using audio-object theory informed by principles of Auditory Scene Analysis (ASA). The initial experiment in this project is a listening test that focuses on subject evaluation of audio objects isolated from context. This experiment will explore inherent inter-object hierarchies of importance using a foreground-background evaluation task. An overview of the experiment will be offered with a summary of initial findings. We envisage further experiments to investigate how factors such as expectation may influence music scene analysis and how this knowledge might be used in object-based delivery scenarios.