1. From Physical Sound Superposition to a New Direction
At the beginning, the project had a different shape in my mind. Last semester I was mainly interested in physical sound superposition: real loudspeakers in a room, sine tones playing at close frequencies, and the listener walking through zones where the sound changes. I liked the idea that the room itself could become a kind of instrument. The piece was not only about listening to tones, but about moving through them and discovering how interference, beating and phase relationships appear in space.
That first idea was more installation-based. I imagined loudspeakers placed in a room and the listener moving physically between them. The focus was on the direct experience of sound in space, not on a screen or an interface. This still feels important to me. Even now, after the project has changed, the original interest is still there: movement, sine tones, spatial relationships, and the strange physical feeling that happens when simple sounds interact.
But as the semester continued, the project moved away from being only a physical loudspeaker installation. In meetings with my professor, it became clear that I needed a more controlled research step before going into the real room. If I directly built a physical installation, many things would happen at once: reflections, room modes, loudspeaker differences, directivity, occlusion, and the listener’s own perception. That can be interesting artistically, but it is difficult to study clearly.
This is where the idea of auralisation entered the project. Instead of trying to simulate the full room, the new direction became: build a controlled direct-sound reference first. In this version, I can define source positions, listener position, distance, direction, level and delay. Then later I can compare that controlled version with the physical room.
So the project did not completely abandon the first idea. It changed its method. The original project was about sound interaction in a real space. The current project builds a headphone-based interactive prototype that can later be tested against a real multi-loudspeaker room. I think this change made the project more realistic as a thesis. It still comes from the same curiosity, but it now has a clearer technical and research structure.
The main question also became more careful. I am no longer asking whether I can completely simulate a room. That would be too large and too easy to overclaim. Instead, the current question is closer to this: how can an interactive binaural auralisation help compare ideal direct-sound behaviour with a real multi-loudspeaker room?
That change in wording matters. It gives the project a better foundation. I can say what the system does, but also what it does not do yet.
