The intersection between sound and music computing and Virtual Reality (VR) has grown significantly over the past decades, amounting to an established area of research today. However, still scarce research has been conducted on the development of specific tools for sound design and composition. In this paper, we investigate a new way of exploring online sound repositories to retrieve sounds to be used in soundscape composition, which leverages the VR medium. Specifically, we created a VR system that allows users to search, download, and explore Freesound content in an immersive manner, as well as to use it for soundscape composition practices via a virtual digital audio workstation (DAW). The tags associated to a sound in the repository were converted into virtual objects and environments, which the user could navigate while listening to the sound. We conducted a user study with 16 composers where the developed system was compared against a conventional counterpart comprising the Freesound web version and the Audacity DAW. Overall, quantitative and qualitative results did not indicate a clear and generalized preference for a system over the other. The usability of the two systems along with their offered creativity support, cognitive workload and emotional impact were deemed to be at a comparable level. Nevertheless, the full potential of VR in creating novel compositional experiences also clearly emerged. Our study shows that VR is an effective medium to support users’ creativity during the process of exploring and selecting sounds from an online repository as well as for composing a soundscape.
Immersive listening systems have grown significantly over the past decade and are now an established area of scientific, artistic, and industrial research. However, scarce research has been conducted on musicians' preferences for playing through headphones over binaural spatialization systems with the addition of head tracking, as opposed to classical stereophonic systems. This comparison is essential to optimally support the playing experience with others for cases of remote collaborative playing, individual instrumental practice, individual recreational music-making using backing tracks, and studio recording sessions. In this article, we study the preferences of playing musicians for a stereophonic system versus a binaural head-tracking system composed of Ambisonics technology and binaural synthesis with generalized head-related transfer functions. We conducted two experiments, each with 30 expert musicians, where participants were asked to rate and compare the 2 listening conditions while playing their instrument either seated or standing. Overall, the quantitative and qualitative results indicated a generalized preference for the binaural system with head tracking over the stereophonic system, with higher ratings for localization, immersion, social presence, realism, and connection with other musicians. Moreover, participants moved their heads significantly more in the binaural conditions. This phenomenon may be explained by the higher engagement and arousal due to the improved auditory experience, or alternatively by the presence of embodied music cognition mechanisms that cause a higher degree of exploration to better understand the action-perception loop. These findings highlight the need for progressing current commercial hardware and software systems used by musicians while playing over headphones.
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