The creation, consumption and commercialisation of podcasts have increased rapidly in recent years, yet there is limited research exploring the creators who are often the source of the products in this relatively new medium, as well as the workflows they utilise in making podcasts. Based on semi-structured interviews with sixteen professional podcast creators, and subsequent thematic analysis, this paper 1) codifies and quantifies the activities involved in podcast creation, 2) distils the archetypal podcast production workflow, 3) finds that this workflow is remarkably consistent as a function of podcast genre and creator affiliation (independent or part of a media organisation), and 4) sheds light on the “creator” role that has become a distinctive feature of the medium. This snapshot of the inner workings of the creation process, in the evolution of a highly engaging medium, could form the basis for identifying potential innovations that would increase the interactivity of podcasts in future.

Object-based audio is an emerging representation for audio content, where content is represented in a reproduction-format-agnostic way and, thus, produced once for consumption on many different kinds of devices. This affords new opportunities for immersive, personalized, and interactive listening experiences. This paper introduces an end-to-end object-based spatial audio pipeline, from sound recording to listening. A high-level system architecture is proposed, which includes novel audio-visual interfaces to support object-based capture and listener-tracked rendering, and incorporates a proposed component for objectification, that is, recording content directly into an object-based form. Text-based and extensible metadata enable communication between the system components. An open architecture for object rendering is also proposed. The system's capabilities are evaluated in two parts. First, listener-tracked reproduction of metadata automatically estimated from two moving talkers is evaluated using an objective binaural localization model. Second, object-based scene capture with audio extracted using blind source separation (to remix between two talkers) and beamforming (to remix a recording of a jazz group) is evaluated with perceptually motivated objective and subjective experiments. These experiments demonstrate that the novel components of the system add capabilities beyond the state of the art. Finally, we discuss challenges and future perspectives for object-based audio workflows.

Perception of spatial coherence and boundaries for the fusion of spatially incoherent stimuli in the context of multimedia reproduction have mainly been studied with continuous judgment scales. As results vary greatly between different studies, reaction time measurements are proposed as an indirect measure of the perception of spatial incoherence. Word recognition tasks for spatially coherent and incoherent audio-visual stimuli were conducted. Results show that reaction time measurements are sensitive to audio-visual offsets and that they are affected at the smallest measured offset (5.1°).

There are currently many spatial audio reproduction systems in domestic use (e.g. mono, stereo, surround sound, sound bars, and headphones). In an experiment, pairwise preference magnitude ratings for a range of such systems were collected from trained and untrained listeners. The ratings were analysed using internal preference mapping to: (i) uncover the principal perceptual dimensions of listener preference; (ii) label the dimensions based on important perceptual attributes; and (iii) observe differences between trained and untrained listeners. To aid with labelling the dimensions, perceptual attributes were elicited alongside the preference ratings and were analysed by: (i) considering a metric derived from the frequency of use of each attribute and the magnitude of the related preference judgements; and (ii) observing attribute use for comparisons between specific methods. The first preference dimension accounted for over 90% of the variance in ratings; all participants exhibited a preference for reproduction methods that were positively correlated with the first dimension (most notably 5-, 9-, and 22-channel surround sound). This dimension was related to multiple important attributes, including those associated with spatial capability and absence of distortions. The second dimension accounted for only a very small proportion of the variance, and appeared to separate the headphone method from the other methods. The trained and untrained listeners generally showed opposite preferences in the second dimension, suggesting that trained listeners have a higher preference for headphone reproduction than untrained listeners.