Academic presents industry-leading research into immersive audio at AES event
The University of Huddersfield’s Professor Hyunkook Lee has spoken about his industry-leading research into immersive audio at a recent international convention organised by the prestigious Audio Engineering Society.
Professor Lee, who is Director of the Applied Psychoacoustics Lab (APL) and Centre for Audio and Psychoacoustic Engineering (CAPE) at the University, was selected to provide a keynote speech at the annual AES event, which was held in Warsaw, Poland, this year.
His presentation, entitled Dimensions of Immersive Audio Experiences, saw him discuss how to make spatial audio truly immersive by utilising a conceptual model he created with immersive experience at its core. Key factors that combine to make a fully immersive experience include physical presence, social and self-presence, and involvement.
Professor Lee commented: “It was a real honour to be invited to deliver the keynote at the 158th AES International Convention. It was a wonderful opportunity to share my research and perspectives on immersive audio, and to connect with fellow researchers, engineers, and practitioners who are shaping the future of this field. I felt deeply encouraged by the positive feedback on my talk.”
He also presented a workshop at the convention detailing a collaborative research project he is currently working on. The ECHO Project aims to provide a super high-quality, open-access database of immersive orchestral recordings for research and education. The recordings were made using eight different microphone arrays developed by a world-class team of some of the industry's leading sound engineers, including three Grammy winners.
The project was organised by Professor Lee, sound engineer and researcher Dr Katia Sochaczewska and film scoring engineer, mixer and producer Nick Wollage. It brought together a focus group of expert sound engineers, Kellogg Boynton, Anthony Caruso, Morten Lindberg, Simon Ratcliffe and Mark Willsher. The orchestral composition was provided by the Oscar-winning composer Volker Bertelmann, and the recordings were done at the AIR Studios Lyndhurst Hall, a legendary film scoring studio in London.
A further success at the convention saw a paper on immersive audio written by UoH academics Dr Chris Dewey, Dr Austin Moore, and Professor Lee awarded the Journal of the AES Best Paper Award at the convention.
The paper is entitled Practitioners’ Perspectives on Spatial Audio: Insights into Dolby Atmos and Binaural Mixes in Popular Music and presents the results of a study combining the response from focus groups with professional music producers and a questionnaire completed by over 100 practitioners.
Professor Lee has a long history with the Audio Engineering Society, which is the only professional body devoted exclusively to audio technology. In 2018, he was awarded a Fellowship by the AES after his work in spatial audio psychoacoustics was endorsed by five experts and awarded a distinction by the organisation’s board.
He is currently the Vice-Chair of the AES High-Resolution Audio Technical Committee and Associate Technical Editor of the AES and served as the Society’s Governor from 2022 to 2023. He received the Board of Governors Award in recognition of chairing the 2023 Spatial and Immersive Audio Conference at the University of Huddersfield.
(All images: AES/Marcin Krokowski)
