Customer Reviews

3D Sound for Virtual Reality and Multimedia

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This publication deals with the human factors and signal processing aspects of audio in 3-D systems. It is divided into six chapters:
1. Virtual Auditory Space: Context, Acoustics, and Psychoacoustics
2. Overview of Spatial Hearing Part 1: Azimuth and Elevation Perception
3. Overview of Spatial Hearing Part 2: Sound Source Distance and Environmental Context
4. Implementing 3-D Sound Systems, Sources, and Signal Processing
5. Virtual Acoustic Applications
6. Resources
Chapters one through four are the most useful as they present details of psychoacoustics, physical acoustics, and signal processing with plenty of instructive diagrams and equations when necessary. Chapters 5 and 6 on applications and resources are the least useful since they focus on these subjects from the perspective of 1994, which might as well be a century ago given the progress made in computing platforms. This publication is still useful since most texts in print on audio today focus on Windows-centric plug-in solutions for games where there are little technical details about the physics of the situation because the targeted reader is a high school or college student writing game programs in their basements. If you think this rather academic tome is for you, it is now available free on the web. Since Amazon tends to throw out reviews with web addresses in them, suffice it to say if you type in "3-D sound for virtual reality and multimedia" in quotations as I show it here into Google, the first web address you see should be the on-line version of this book.
The reader should already be familiar with digital signal processing in order to get the most out of this publication. If you are planning on doing the "big picture" design of a 3-D audio application, this old publication is essential reading.

I'm pretty sure that it is also the only book presently available. It IS fairly well written, and if you are writing a sound engine for a game, or a similar application, I would strongly recommend this book. On the other hand, parts of it are extremely technical, so if you do not know if you can follow it, you may wish to keep looking.