Why can't a microphone "hear" like a human? And how can the advantages of human hearing be technically replicated? Oldenburg researchers led by Simon Doclo and Timo Gerkmann presented the interaction with sound together with partners from an international project at an exclusive London science show.
The University of Oldenburg was the only German university to be represented at the Royal Society's renowned "Summer Science Exhibition" this year. A team of experts in audio signal processing led by Doclo and Gerkmann and the Oldenburg project group of the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology presented "Interaction with sound in a three-dimensional world" as partners in the international research project DREAMS.
The DREAMS project - the abbreviation stands for "Reverberation Suppression and Reverberation of Audio, Music and Speech" in German - is one of a total of 22 projects, mainly from universities in the United Kingdom, selected by the Royal Society this year. In addition to the Oldenburg scientists, the universities of Leuven (Belgium) and Aalborg (Denmark), Imperial College London and several industrial companies are also involved in the project.
Their aim is to transfer scientific methods for suppressing reverberation and background noise into products such as hearing aids or smartphones as quickly as possible in order to improve both speech comprehension and automatic speech recognition in complex acoustic environments. "The invitation to London is a sign that the research in the DREAMS project is valued," says Simon Doclo. "Work on reverberation cancellation has been going on for around ten years, but the newly developed statistical methods have enabled a breakthrough."
The "Summer Science Exhibition" opened its doors for a week in the middle of London - near St James' Park and Downing Street. At the DREAMS exhibition stand, visitors were able to try out on a computer how reverberant environments sound - and how noise and reverberation disappear when algorithms, i.e. calculation rules, co-developed by the Doclo team are switched on. The exhibits also included a robot that listens to voice commands - and reacts differently depending on the reverberation.