"Hearing and audio technology: A journey from MP3 to the cinema of the 21st century" - on 11 September 2008, Prof. Dr Karlheinz Brandenburg (Ilmenau), winner of the German Future Prize and Director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology, will give a public lecture on this topic in the lecture hall centre of the University of Oldenburg. Brandenburg is one of the most internationally renowned German scientists due to the development and standardisation of MP3. MP3 has become a synonym for digital audio technology, for "listening to music everywhere". Brandenburg's lecture will take place as part of the annual conference of the German Society for Medical Physics (DGMP), which is being held at the University of Oldenburg from 10 to 13 September. Around 400 medical physicists from Germany and abroad are expected to attend. "This lecture is a special highlight of the conference, not only because of its connection to the film festival taking place at the same time, but also because of the recent establishment of a Fraunhofer project group for hearing, speech and audio technology in Oldenburg, which will initially be run as a branch of Karlheinz Brandenburg's Institute," explained the conference president and head of the Fraunhofer project group, Prof. Dr Dr Birger Kollmeier. "We are very pleased and proud that we have been able to attract an internationally recognised speaker for our conference, whose commitment to the new Oldenburg facility will help forge a strong alliance between audio systems and hearing aids of the future." In his lecture, Brandenburg will give an introduction to the world of hi-fi technology, focussing in particular on spatial hearing. While music can now be stored and reproduced largely unaltered, there is still a lot of expertise needed to create the perfect sound illusion. MP3 was one of the first methods to outwit the ear by destroying 90 per cent of the information through quantisation, while still allowing almost undisturbed listening pleasure. The process deliberately relies on a psychoacoustic model to decide which frequency components need to be quantised and how, without the difference becoming audible.
But the research goes further: the old dream of acoustic immersion, the feeling of being naturally "there", is moving into the realm of reality with new technologies. The lecture will focus in particular on the method of wave field synthesis, with which complex sound fields can be reproduced completely across the entire room and not just at individual points. Application examples from the areas of theme parks, virtual reality and cinema technology prove the thesis that (almost) perfect spatial reproduction is no longer just science fiction. However, listening is not just about clear, unadulterated sound, as provided by today's hi-fi systems. For many people, it is even more important how well speech can be understood even in difficult and noisy environments, and how the ear and brain can pick out individual acoustic events from the room. This is where modern research into hearing aids and the latest hi-fi technology come together. Further information: Conference DGMP Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology