SAQAS

Spatial Audio Quality Assessment Scenes

Available since
Part of the Audio Research work stream

Introduction

A library of sound scenes for evaluation of spatial audio systems.

What is it?

To evaluate different spatial audio systems a set of spatial audio scenes has been created. The aim is to develop these towards a complete library of test scenes to evaluate reproduction systems, codecs and rendering systems. The scenes are stored using a novel extension of the broadcast wave format (BWF). An initial set of files has been published. This includes different scenes in an object-based representation and their rendition into five channels. The library is open for further contributions of critical material. A software library for the use with the SoundScape Renderer is available as well.

Downloads

Licence

Unless otherwise stated, all data on this site is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 licence:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/.

BWF Scene Files

5-channel Renderings

Coming soon...

Software

  • wave_bwf Python modules for handling Broadcast Wave Format files.
  • adm_xml Python modules for handling Audio Definition Model XML data.
  • ssr_utils Python modules for playing the BWF sound scenes with the SoundScape Renderer.

SSR Loudspeaker Setup Files

Usage

Reference software is provided, written in Python, to allow reading and playing of the BWF files in the SAQAS dataset.

Pre-Requisites

In order to use the reference player, you must first install the following:

  • Python 2.7
  • SoundScape Renderer Should be installed from source code, requires installation with Ecasound support and the IP interface enabled. Tested with version 0.4.1.

Installation

Download, extract, and install the provided Python libraries (wave_bwf, adm_xml, and ssr_utils). Run the following command from within the library source directory to install:

sudo python setup.py install

Running

An executable is provided in the ssr_utils library for playing the BWF files using the SoundScapeRenderer. It is used like so:

python ssr_player.py <bwf_filename.wav>

The above will play the BWF file using the binaural renderer in SSR. To use the VBAP renderer with, for example, an ITU 5 channel loudspeaker system, run:

python ssr_player.py --renderer=vbap --spkr_setup_file=sbsbrir-speakers-ITU5.asd <bwf_filename.wav>

The --spkr_setup_file argument provides a file specifying the loudspeaker arrangement to use. There are several example loudspeaker setup files available above. These correspond to loudspeaker positions available in the SBSBRIR dataset.

Combining With Binaural Simulation

The SAQAS dataset was released alongside a binaural impulse response dataset, SBSBRIR. It provides binaural room impulse responses measurements for simulating spatial audio reproduction systems at multiple listening positions.

The SoundScape Renderer's Binaural Room Scanning (BRS) renderer can be used in combination with the SAQAS SSR player application or another BWF player, to assess loudspeaker playback subjectively.

Note that the SAQAS SSR player and a SSR BRS simulation must be run on different machine hosts.

Reference

Documentation

  • Poster from DAGA 2014 Initial presentation of this dataset at the 40th Annual German Congress on Acoustics in Oldenburg.

External Resources

  • EBU Tech 3285 Specification of the Broadcast Wave Format (BWF) - A format for audio data files in broadcasting
  • EBU Tech 3364 Audio Definition Model - Metadata specification
  • SoundScape Renderer A tool for real-time spatial audio reproduction providing a variety of rendering algorithms.

People and Partners

People