2. Learning the Auralisation Idea Through Drawings and Discussion
One of the important turning points was a meeting where my professor explained the auralisation approach in a very practical way. He drew things on paper: source positions, listener position, signal flow, and how the values should move from a visual interface into audio processing. That was educational for me because it turned the project from a vague spatial-audio idea into a system I could actually build.
Before that, I understood the general concept, but not yet the full chain. I knew that I wanted sound to react to movement. I knew that source distance should affect level. I knew that direction should matter. But the system was still blurry. The drawings helped me understand that the project needed clear stages: an interface, a calculation part, OSC communication, REAPER, spatial audio plug-ins, and finally binaural playback.
This also helped me understand why the word “simulation” is dangerous. A full simulation would mean modelling the complete acoustic behaviour of a room. That includes reflections, reverberation, diffraction, occlusion, source directivity and probably much more. My system does not do that. It calculates the direct path between a source and a listener. That is already useful, but it is not the whole room.
So I started to think of the project as a controlled direct-sound auralisation. This means the prototype gives an audible version of a simple physical relationship: where is the source, where is the listener, how far apart are they, what direction is the source, how much should the level decrease, and how late should the sound arrive?
That framing made the project less grand but much stronger. It also made the next semester clearer. If the prototype represents an ideal direct-sound condition, then the real room can later be understood as the thing that adds complexity. The CUBE will add reflections, room response, interference, loudspeaker behaviour and real perception.
In that sense, the drawings were not just technical notes. They changed how I thought about the thesis. Instead of trying to make a huge system that claims too much, I could build something smaller but testable. That was probably one of the most important lessons in the process.
It also changed my confidence. I had something concrete to implement. The project became a set of solvable problems instead of one giant abstract spatial-audio dream.
