Virtual reality music in the real world

Virtual sound localization techniques are becoming increasingly popular when listening to music over headphones. These methods involve binaural audio rendering, which requires adaptation to movements of the listener's head and body, for example when listening to music in a train or in a car. Proposed solutions use virtual loudspeakers controlled by head-tracking devices, where the directional cues in a musical track relate to a reference direction in the real-world coordinate system. This paper also discusses the question: Which is the ideal reference direction for head tracking, and how should head tracking adapt to a listener in motion? We propose the NX-tracker algorithm, addressing a wide-range of music-listening and movie-watching use cases, with solutions for one and two tracking sensors.