FRidh's blog

Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought -- Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

Research visit to Chalmers

After the ASA meeting in Indianapolis I went to Gothenburg again for a research visit. As I wrote in my previous post it was strange to be there again. Last spring I visited Gothenburg for just a couple of days, but now, staying for seven weeks again is quite different. You start noticing quite a lot of things have changed. Many people I knew there have moved away and I also noticed a couple of restaurants I visited have closed since. Despite those things it was nice meeting old friends again.

So, as I wrote in the title I went there on a research visit. The main reason for my visit was to attend some courses at Chalmers but to also work on my research. Initially the idea was to investigate further the model we're developing to deal with atmospheric turbulence in aircraft auralisations. However, in the end the courses took more time then I expected, so I didn't really get to work on the turbulence model anymore. However, I did manage to implement one nice part of the auralisation tool, namely support for Ambisonics.

Besides Chalmers I also visited SP in Borås. SP was a familar place for me as well since I did an internship there in 2010. Earlier I had made recordings with a SoundField microphone, however, at Empa we do not have an Ambisonics setup. SP has a listening room with a third order Ambisonics system, giving me the possibility to listen to the first order recording as well as to higher order auralisations.

One visit I met up with Peter Lundén who installed the system. After some problem solving we managed to get both the recordings and auralisations working. Unfortunately there was one problem with the auralisations, somehow halfway the aircraft makes a U-turn. While I haven't checked it any further, I think it is due to the inclusion of the Condon-Shortley phase in the function I used to calculate the spherical harmonics.