An information processing apparatus includes a forward deciding unit that makes a decision as to a user's forward according to the user's orientation information, a sound generating unit that creates sound data assigned to each of virtual sound sources placed in a plurality of directions preset in advance, a compressing unit that performs compression on the created sound data by the sound generating unit in different ways between the created sound data corresponding to the user's forward obtained by the forward deciding unit and the created sound data corresponding to a direction other than the user's forward, and a communication unit that transmits the compressed sound data by the compressing unit.