AudioBIFS: Describing audio scenes with the MPEG-4 multimedia standard

Abstract

We present an overview of the AudioBIFS system, part of the Binary Format for Scene Description (BIFS) tool in the MPEG-4 International Standard. AudioBIFS is the tool that integrates the synthetic and natural sound coding functions in MPEG-4. It allows the flexible construction of soundtracks and sound scenes using compressed sound, sound synthesis, streaming audio, interactive and terminal-dependent presentation, threedimensional (3-D) spatialization, environmental auralization, and dynamic download of custom signal-processing effects algorithms. MPEG-4 sound scenes are based on a model that is a superset of the model in VRML 2.0, and we describe how MPEG-4 is built upon VRML and the new capabilities provided by MPEG-4. We discuss the use of structured audio orchestra language, the MPEG-4 SAOL, for writing downloadable effects, present an example sound scene built with AudioBIFS, and describe the current state of implementations of the standard.

Object-Based Reverberation for Spatial Audio

“…The main examples of high-level parametric reverberation are found in the physical and perceptual parameters for room modeling in MPEG-4 v2 [13,36]. Physical parameters are specified in terms of the transmission paths in the environment and frequency-dependent directivity models for each sound source, and are rendered by computational acoustic modeling and convolution.…”

“…Digital synthesis of reverberation is a topic that has attracted much research over many decades [10][11][12]. In particular, part of the MPEG-4 standard [13,14] describes parametric reverberation techniques based on highlevel descriptions of the desired room. Other approaches, such as spatial impulse response rendering (SIRR) [15] and the spatial decomposition method (SDM) [16] are based on low-level analysis and synthesis of a specific recorded acoustic space.…”

Sound in COLLADA

“…The following figure represents a scene described in MPEG4 and VRML. [5,6] provides probably the most advanced scene language considering the sound aspect. As one can see in Fig.…”

Object-based audio for interactive football broadcast

“…In this standard audio BIFS (BInary Format for Stream) are used to represent both natural and synthetic audio in a three dimensional scene graph (Scheirer et al, 1999) allowing implementation of 3D audio features into gaming, virtual environments and other interactive media applications (Lindsay and Herre, 2001). The MPEG-4 standard is extremely comprehensive and is perhaps hampered by its complexity which has not seen it widely adopted.…”