Abstract:

There is no getting away from the fact that new methodologies and resources are required to optimize the students' knowledge construction, while at the same time, improving the educational and learning processes. Nowadays, the student’s autonomy is highly considered as a key competence, in particular their autonomy with respect to their capacity of learning-to-learn. Furthermore, the active implication on the activities proposed during the subject is an important factor to make them feel more involved with the contents worked on. Consequently, the reflection and development of new teaching approaches should be oriented to reinforce both learning-to-learn ability and learning by doing experiences.

This work describes an original experience based on these principles of innovative teaching. The experience has been carried out during the last academic year in the course "Audio 3D" in the Audiovisuals System Engineering graduate course at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Spain).

The main idea is to develop an interactive 3D audio simulator which gives the students the opportunity to experiment the different 3D spatialization techniques including classical stereo, binaural, transaural and VBAP. This simulation software allows interacting with the different algorithm parameters and provides comparison of the performance of the different techniques in terms of source localization and subjective perception.

This teaching innovation experience is focused on learning-to-learn and learning-by-doing principles. For that reason new learning resources and activities have been generated in this specific course (Audio 3D). The methodology applied requires an active student role: Students should revise the material and interact with the simulator in real-time in order to assert the theoretical concepts meaningfully. The material and the simulation program are available in a web-based platform. In this way, the autonomous study is reinforced making use of web-based resources. In order to assess the impact of this methodology on the learning process, an evaluation is performed before and after the introduction of the new material. The results show an improvement in the way the students understand the techniques and their associated problems.

Keywords:

Spatial audio, 3D audio, stereo, binaural, experimental learning, innovative teaching.