Augmented Reality to Improve Orchestra Conductor's Headphone Monitoring

摘要

Conductors face challenges when conducting an orchestra using headphones to synchronize with a soundtrack or a click. We sent a survey to 12 international conductors to identify and classify those challenges. They primarily reported on issues related to balance and level, aggressive clicks, and the difficulty of hearing the acoustic sound of the orchestra, leading 8 of them to remove one of the headphone earcups. A solution using augmented reality monitoring through binaural rendering and head tracking was tested in situ and showed that it could successfully reproduce the acoustic sound of the orchestra on the headphones. Another perceptual experiment confirmed the potential of this solution for achieving acoustic homogeneity when superposing 2 binaural auditory scenes recorded in the same acoustic space but at different times. These results encourage us to further develop immersive monitoring systems for conductor, with the soundtrack/click integrated in the real acoustic space.