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HRTF Measurement Systems
 
Accurate HRTF (head related transfer function) measurement associated with a human head is often very much emphasized in the field of virtual sound rendering employing either a headphone set or a multi-channel speaker system. So far what's commonly referred to as HRTF data is mostly limited to measurement in the far field: The sound source is located at distances greater than 1 m from the center of the human head or so called 'dummy head microphone system'. Numerous far field HRTF data and their characteristics corresponding to changes in amplitude and phase depending on source locations have been well documented and are available in literature. However, this alone is not adequate to create a fully immersive sound field describing a virtual sound source at an arbitrary position. With current systems that involve these HRTF data, the listeners often cannot distinguish front from rear and above from below regarding the source position. Thus various methods have been suggested to improve the performance of common virtual sound systems, and our approach is via complementation of HRTF library by including near-field HRTF measurements associated with sound sources located within 1m radius of the head center.

At SDAC Laboratory in KAIST, we are currently developing an experimental setup to accurately measure near-field HRTFs using a dummy head microphone system.