Development of Project Concept

My first concept for the honours project was derived from reading about how the music industry has changed over the past years, which was very interesting from a sound engineers point of view. With the growing live music industry and falling recorded music industry i wanted to be able to create a project around being able to recreate live events, so that they could be 're-lived' again and again utilising 5.1 Surround Sound. I chose to use surround sound because it is something that interests me and there are many different surround production and recording techniques out there that can reproduce realistic audio. From this i wanted to test different 5.1 recording techniques (thinking only about microphone arrays at this point) and have the public rate the techniques in terms of the level of presence/feeling of being at the event by participating in a subjective listening test. My reasons for using a listening test in the project is because i have read articles and journals by researchers that utilise them and they have produced well formed pieces of research. 

However after researching different surround production techniques and other studies i felt that this concept was ineffective in testing different techniques. The feeling of presence is a completely subjective thing, thus it would hard to rate and define to create an effective listening test. 

Refined Concept:

While researching surround microphone arrays, i saw an article in Sound on Sound on a technique called Upmixing. After reading the article which is discussed in a previous post in November 2012 called "Research into Upmixing" i decided to change the concept of the project and make it a simpler but effective test using two completely different surround techniques:

To create a test to assess the qualities and listener preference between Upmixing techniques and 5.1 Microphone techniques. The test will be created specifically for the techniques applications in recording live events and performances.