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International broadcast award for BBC and University of Salford

Monday 31 October 2016

SMART phones, fast data networks and the iPlayer have seen more and more of us listening to programmes over headphones.

Currently the majority of audio is produced in stereo, left or right. When listened to over headphones, the sound is confined to the inside of your head unlike real life where sound appears to come from all around you. With the recent explosion in VR technology, there is a need for more realistic audio over headphones to get the sound up to scratch with the VR visuals.

New techniques being developed at the University of Salford create a richer sense of sound, giving a more exciting listening experience – meaning the sort of 3D immersive sound you find in cinemas can be listened to at home, on the train, wherever you and your headphones wish to go!

The Acoustics Research Centre is already working with the BBC on so-called binaural sound, which is a technology that allows the reproduction of sound from all around the listener but over headphones – just like in real life.

'Best achievement in sound'

And as a measure of their progress, their experimental short film - The Turning Forest – has won TVB Europe Award for Best Achievement in Sound, beating the BBC’s Proms coverage and Britain’s Got Talent.

The beauty of the film is that rather than draw viewers in by visuals, it does so with sound: sound first, graphics afterwards.

A virtual reality fantasy The Turning Forest, is produced by VRTOV with 3D sound by BBC Research and Development with S3A – a collaborative research study part-based at Salford University and funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.

Indeed, the film actually originated as a platform to test S3A’s research, as Dr James Woodcock, explains: “We commissioned the audio to allow us to study how audio may be produced in the future using an approach called object-based audio.

“One of the scenes we made was picked up and turned into The Turning Forest which premiered at Tribeca Film Festival in New York and has won this TVB award, which is amazing.”

'Frighteningly realistic'

Chris Pike, senior scientist at the BBC who worked with James and supervisors Professors Trevor Cox and Bill Davies, said: “One of the issues is unlike a surround sound room, when listening with headphones or with VR, the sound can only come from two speakers. – and the sounds need to stay fixed in space while you turn your head.”

Even if you can source a sound from a certain direction, the engineers still have to make it sound like it’s really there – that’s where binaural sound comes in. Binaural techniques simulate the hearing cues created by acoustic interaction between our bodies and the environment around us. Audio signals are filtered to introduce these cues and give the impression that a sound source is located outside of the head at a given location in space.

The results are frighteningly realistic and contributing to a growing body of work including for BBC Taster including Unearthed, in collaboration with the Natural History Unity and Realise.

Listen yourself here – the binaural demo at 5 minutes in particular, http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2016-05-virtual-reality-sound-in-the-turning-forest

-S3A Future Spatial Audio for an Immersive Listener Experience at Home is a six-year £5.4million study between the Universities of Salford, Southampton and Surrey and project partners, the BBC .  http://gow.epsrc.ac.uk/NGBOViewGrant.aspx?GrantRef=EP/L000539/1