Aachen/Oldenburg. At this year’s Annual Conference on Acoustics (DAGA) in Aachen, the German Acoustical Society (DEGA) awarded the Lothar Cremer Prize for outstanding achievements by early-career researchers to Dr rer. nat. Jan Rennies-Hochmuth. The Society is thereby recognising his research into auditory perception and, in particular, speech intelligibility in the presence of reverberation, echoes and background noise. Rennies-Hochmuth is working on computer-based models for predicting the perception of loudness and speech intelligibility. As part of his work at the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology (IDMT), he translates findings from basic research into technological applications in the fields of automotive, communications and consumer electronics.

Rennies-Hochmuth studied Engineering Physics at the University of Oldenburg under Professor Birger Kollmeier and Professor Jesko Verhey, and at the Technical University of Denmark in Lyngby. In 2007, Rennies-Hochmuth was awarded the Lower Saxony Science Prize for his bachelor’s thesis on loudness perception. Since 2008, he has played a key role in establishing the Oldenburg-based Hearing, Speech and Audio Technology project group at the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology (IDMT), initially as a doctoral candidate and, since 2012, as group leader.

The Lothar Cremer Prize is one of the most prestigious annual awards in Germany in the field of technical acoustics and comes with a prize of €2,000.

[Press release of the Fraunhofer IDMT, (c) Meike Hummerich, 16 March 2016]