Oldenburg. On November 17th/18th, the new research building NeSSy served for the first time as a meeting place for a group of hearing scientists which has been set up and run by Prof. Dr. Dr. Birger Kollmeier. At their 8th annual meeting, over 30 members of the European network ARCHES (Audiological Research Cores in Europe) from Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain and the Netherlands presented new findings and procedures and discussed a great variety of topics. These topics ranged from the processing of temporal fine structure and the measurement and modeling of speech intelligibility to audiovisual processing and listening effort. But also problematic social topics like the misophonia - the reduced tolerance towards specific sounds - were discussed. On the second day, a short visit to the House of Hearing and the Garden of Hearing was included.

The annual ARCHES meeting takes place in alternating locations within Europe and aims to aid in the exchange of ideas and the scientific cooperation between European hearing scientists. This year, a particular focus of the meeting was on the presentation and discussion of a huge number of projects from young scientists.