Aerospace and Defence

Realistic, and immersive sound in simulation and training is essential for enhancing situational awareness, replicating the stress and chaos of operations, and improving decision-making skills. It creates a more authentic and engaging environment, enabling soldiers and first responders to practice responding to auditory cues such as enemy fire, approaching vehicles, or distant threats. Accurate sound also prepares personnel for the psychological and emotional challenges of warfare, policing, or disaster by simulating high-pressure scenarios, enhancing communication in noisy conditions, and conditioning them to manage stress. Overall, it plays a critical role in developing both technical proficiency and mental resilience in military operations. Unrealistic sound suspends disbelief at best and creates a negative training environment at worst.
Soundscape modeling revolutionizes auditory experiences by replicating real-world environments, objects, and spatial sound dynamics, essential for immersive training simulations in Aerospace and Defence. Developed by Spatial Sound Dynamics Labs (SSDL), this process and technology ensures precise spatial audio fidelity critical for enhanced training realism in spatial computing applications.

Soundscape modeling recreates the acoustic properties of three-dimensional spaces and objects, capturing spatial dynamics, doppler effects, refraction, and reflections. This enables accurate perception of directional sounds and dynamic cause-and-effect, which are crucial for improving situational awareness and training efficacy in simulated operational environments.

Requires: Expertise, Hardware, & Software
SSDL employs advanced techniques such as spherical, 3D and point source capture arrays along with sound field synthesis. These methods are crucial for capturing a comprehensive range of auditory cues, ensuring spatial fidelity within interactive and simulation platforms.

Requires: Expertise, Software, & Hardware
Post-processing optimizes soundscapes for specific playback technologies (e.g., headphones, immersive audio systems) and platforms such as game and audio engines, ensuring the highest-resolution and true to life reproduction tailored to immersive training environments and operational needs.

Traditional object-based systems allow audio objects to be positioned in 3D space but are constrained by speaker placement or virtual speaker configurations in headphones. These systems perform well with overhead and lateral sounds but struggle with auditory cues from behind and below due to limited resolution and channel constraints.
SSDL’s spherical recording and reproduction use specialized arrays and techniques to capture sound in a fully spherical, high-resolution field. This ensures accurate spatial dynamics, including sound originating from behind or below the listener, and provides real-time spatial detail essential for realism.

Object-based systems rely on predefined audio channels and virtualized objects. While functional, this approach often simplifies and limits the spatial resolution of sound fields.
SSDL’s approach leverages sound field synthesis, reconstructing environments by combining real-world audio sources with models of how sound waves behave in space. This method preserves spatial resolution in all directions and distances, resulting in more lifelike and detailed soundscapes.

Traditional systems simulate environmental acoustics but are often limited by speaker or headphone setups, leading to approximated reverberation effects.
SSDL’s technology accurately captures environmental acoustics, including how sound waves interact with surfaces. By reproducing sound reflections, refractions, and absorptions with high precision, SSDL creates a more immersive and realistic auditory experience—essential for simulating complex training environments.

Many systems struggle to accurately model fast-moving sound sources. Doppler effects, which alter the frequency of sound as it moves relative to the listener, are often imprecise due to limitations in object positioning.
SSDL excels in replicating Doppler effects and time-based dynamics by using precise tracking of both the listener and sound sources. This capability creates a highly dynamic and immersive auditory experience, simulating realistic operational environments.

Object-based systems typically underperform when reproducing sounds from below the listener. The channel configuration focuses on lateral and overhead sound cues, neglecting vertically downward audio.
SSDL’s spherical capture encompasses all acoustic dimensions, including vertical cues from below the listener. Additionally, enhanced low-frequency recording techniques ensure full impact from bass and sub-bass frequencies, contributing to immersive and realistic training scenarios.

While traditional systems scale down audio complexity for consumer-grade equipment, limiting overall resolution, SSDL custom-tailors soundscapes for specific playback systems and simulation environments. This ensures that listeners using advanced spatial audio hardware experience the highest fidelity soundscapes, delivering an ultra-realistic and immersive auditory experience that far exceeds standard systems.