A METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR REAL-TIME IMPLEMENTATION OF TIME-VARYING HEAD-RELATED TRANSFER FUNCTIONS

The invention relates to a method and corresponding system for real-time simulation of N moving or stationary sound sources in a space surrounding a listener, which method processes N input signals, each of which represents one of the N sound sources, thereby obtaining one or more output signals (10, 66, 92, 93) for a listening device, such as a left output signal (yL(t)) and a right output signal (yR(t)) for a stereophonic headphone (98, 99) or the like, which method comprises using solely a single set of fixed filters (57, 58, 59, 60) to simulate all of said N moving or stationary sound sources. The method and system of the invention provide an efficient method for creating many simultaneous sound sources relative to a listener using very low signal processing power. By application of the principles of the invention there is provided a method and corresponding system by means of which it is possible to support head-movements of the listener as well as movements of the simulated sound sources relative to the listener, that offer a good spatial resolution of simulated sound sources and that enables real-time simulation of spatial sound images without the use of detailed or even individualized head-related transfer functions (HRTFs).