Spatial Audio Guide
This guide builds spatial audio from the ground up: what "spatial" means, how the ear locates sound, the techniques that exploit those mechanisms, the acoustics of real rooms, the recording methods, and the system design used in cinemas, concert halls, studios and installations. No prior knowledge is needed to start.
Published so far
Published little by little
The guide is being released one chapter every two weeks, part by part, so it grows little by little. Chapters not yet published are not listed here.
The approach
- From first principles. Techniques are derived from how the ear actually hears, not presented as recipes, so each one becomes a variation on a few core ideas.
- A single thread: encode, then decode. Almost every method, from Ambisonics to wave field synthesis, encodes a sound field into a finite representation and then decodes it for the system present; channel-based formats rely instead on loudspeaker positions fixed by a standard.
- Grounded in perception. A system reproduces the cues the ear interprets: the time and level differences between the ears, the filtering of the head, the ratio of direct to reverberant sound. Equations appear where a relationship has to be exact, each explained in words and followed by a worked example.
- Sourced. Every numeric claim carries a primary reference, listed at the end of the chapter that makes it.