The AES 140th International Convention Committee has announced that Spatial
Audio expert Rozenn Nicol will deliver the Richard C. Heyser Memorial Lecture on
Saturday, June 4, 2016, at the Palais des Congres in Paris, France. The lecture,
titled “The Immersive Audio Revolution: From Labs to Mass-Market,’ which will
address the major developments in spatial audio in recent years, is the latest in the
Heyser Lecture series, first established in May 1999 by the AES Technical Council
and the Board of Governors in conjunction with the Richard Heyser Scholarship
fund. At each convention, this lecture brings eminent individuals in audio
engineering and related fields to speak on a relevant topic of choice.
Nicol’s lecture will help reinforce the Immersive Audio theme at the upcoming Paris
convention, noting many of the changes and opportunities in the field. With the
many developments in spatial audio over the past 25 years, and after more than 50
years of stereophony, new technologies such as Wave Field Synthesis, Higher Order
Ambisonics and Vector-Base Amplitude Panning have been introduced,
demonstrating promise of an enhanced 3D audio experience, where virtual sound
sources can be accurately synthesized in any direction. With the development of
various loudspeaker formats for multichannel audio reproduction, increasing
channel counts and placement schemes, including height channels, offer
improvements in sonic immersion and sound spatialization. In parallel, a burgeoning
assortment of tools is available for the capture, editing, coding and reproduction of
spatial audio. Because these developments require increasingly complex setups of
loudspeakers, immersive audio faces the risk of being limited to movie theatres,
amusement parks and other public spaces. Fortunately, a new step was recently
reached with the binaural adaptation of any multichannel audio format to headphone
listening. Pioneering experiments by radio and television organizations (BBC, Radio
France, France Televisions) show that immersive audio is very close to achieving
mass market penetration.
Rozenn Nicol is a Spatial Audio research engineer at Orange Labs in France, working
on the enhancement of telecommunication services through innovative 3D sound
technologies such as binaural, WFS and ambisonics. She was involved in the
European 5th Framework collaborative project, CARROUSO, together with numerous
universities, research organizations and companies. From 1999–2000 she was a
research engineer on underwater acoustics at the Institut Français de Recherche
pour l’Exploitation de la Mer. During her PhD research, she worked at France
Telecom on the design and assessment of a spatial audio rendering system based
on wavefield synthesis for high quality video conferencing. She holds a number of
patents in the field of spatial audio and has supervised and examined a number of
PhDs on the topic. She has also taught the subject at Masters level at the Universite
de Maine and the Universite de Bretagne Occidentale. In 2010 she authored an AES
Monograph on Binaural Technology.
