The Audio Engineering Society (AES) has drafted spatial audio expert Rozenn Nicol to deliver the Richard C. Heyser Memorial Lecture at its 140th International Convention.
Nicol will address major developments in special audio in her lecture title “The Immersive Audio Revolution: From Labs to Mass-Market” on June 4, 2015 at the Palais des Congrès in Paris, France.
She will cover technologies such as wave field synthesis, higher order ambisonics and vector-base amplitude panning.
Nicol is a spatial audio research engineer at Orange Labs in France, working on the enhancement of telecommunication services through 3D sound technologies such as binaural, WFS and ambisonics. She was involved in the European 5th Framework collaborative project, Carrouso, together with numerous universities, research organizations and companies. From 1999–2000 she was a research engineer on underwater acoustics at the Institut Français de Recherche pour l'Exploitation de la Mer.
During her PhD research, she worked at France Telecom on the design and assessment of a spatial audio rendering system based on wave field synthesis for high quality video conferencing. She holds a number of patents in the field of spatial audio and has supervised and examined a number of PhDs on the topic. She has also taught the subject at Masters level at the Université de Maine and the Université de Bretagne Occidentale. In 2010 she authored an AES Monograph on Binaural Technology.
“‘Revolution’ is not too strong a word to apply to the growth of immersive audio, especially given the parallel virtual reality movement,” said Francis Rumsey, chair of the AES Technical Council. “Dr. Nicol is exceptionally well qualified to recount the path that has led us to the brink of that revolution, as well as offer insights on what the future will bring.”