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How do I calculate head-related transfer functions easily and efficiently?

Wolfgang Kreuzer, a researcher in the Department of Numerics at ARI, is co-author of a recently published article on the software package Mesh2HRTF, which is applied for computation in the field of spatial hearing.

 02.08.2023
Example of a left ear with the colour-coded sound pressure at 7kHz in decibels. Figure 5, p. 507 from the article cited here.

Head-related transfer functions (HRTFs) are personalized acoustic filters, that are created by the interaction of sound with the human head and pinnae. These filters, which are essential for applications in 3D audio can be determined either by using complicated measurements or by computer calculations that are based on a description of the head’s geometry.

The open-source project Mesh2HRTF was originally developed at the ARI with the aim of providing simple and efficient tools for researchers in spatial audio for calculating these filter functions. During the last years Mesh2HRTF was steadily improved and expanded and it is currently developed and maintained by an international team of researchers.

The article, that was written in an international cooperation between ARI, TU Berlin and CEVT (Sweden), describes the algorithms and software packages behind Mesh2HRTF in detail and, thus, provides researchers in spatial hearing with simple guidelines for using all the different elements of the Mesh2HRTF project.

F. Brinkmann, W. Kreuzer, J. Thomsen, S. Dombrovskis, K. Pollack, S. Weinzierl und P. Majdak, “Recent Advances in an Open Software for Numerical HRTF Calculation”, in: Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, vol. 71, Nr. 7/8, S. 502–514, (Juli/August 2023). https://doi.org/10.17743/jaes.2022.0078