Audio and Acoustical Response Analysis Environment (AARAE): a tool to support education and research in acoustics

AARAE is a MATLAB-hosted environment for measurement and analysis of room acoustics and audio systems, designed to support education and research in audio and acoustics. While it already provides a wide range of test signals, and measurement, processing, and analysis methods, one of its main features is easy extensibility. Students new to signal processing (and MATLAB) can use it from its graphical user interface (without any need to write code), whereas more advanced students can develop implementations of pre-existing or novel measurement, processing and analysis algorithms using templates that allow quick integration of functions into the graphical user interface. AARAE was introduced into acoustics teaching at the University of Sydney in 2014, and it is used in both introductory and advanced units. While most of the code for the current version of AARAE was written by the authors, coursework students have contributed to functions in areas such as speech intelligibility, distortion, reverberation parameters and background noise rating. This paper illustrates how AARAE is used in teaching, highlighting some recent student projects in AARAE. It also illustrates how AARAE has been used to support research and research training.