Spatially selective active noise control systems.

Active noise control (ANC) systems are commonly designed to achieve maximal sound reduction regardless of the incident direction of the sound. When desired sound is present, the state-of-the-art methods add a separate system to reconstruct it. This can result in distortion and latency.

Preliminary Examination of the Accuracy of a Fall Detection Device Embedded into Hearing Instruments.

Background: Accidental falls are a significant health risk to older adults and patients seen in audiology clinics. Personal emergency response systems are effective in preventing long lies (defined as remaining on the floor or ground for greater than one hour after a fall), but some individuals would prefer to wear less-conspicuous devices than a traditional neck-worn pendant. No previous investigation has compared the accuracy of head-worn fall detection devices with those worn on other parts of the body.

Monaural Speech Dereverberation Using Temporal Convolutional Networks with Self Attention.

In daily listening environments, human speech is often degraded by room reverberation, especially under highly reverberant conditions. Such degradation poses a challenge for many speech processing systems, where the performance becomes much worse than in anechoic environments. To combat the effect of reverberation, we propose a monaural (single-channel) speech dereverberation algorithm using temporal convolutional networks with self attention.

Effects of reverberation and noise on speech intelligibility in normal-hearing and aided hearing-impaired listeners.

Many hearing-aid wearers have difficulties understanding speech in reverberant noisy environments. This study evaluated the effects of reverberation and noise on speech recognition in normal-hearing listeners and hearing-impaired listeners wearing hearing aids. Sixteen typical acoustic scenes with different amounts of reverberation and various types of noise maskers were simulated using a loudspeaker array in an anechoic chamber.

Generalized acoustic energy density based active noise control in single frequency diffuse sound fields.

In a diffuse sound field, prior research has established that a secondary source can theoretically achieve perfect cancellation at an error microphone in the far field of the secondary source. However, the sound pressure level is generally only reduced in a small zone around the error sensor, and at a distance half of a wavelength away from the error sensor, the averaged sound pressure level will be increased by more than 10 dB. Recently an acoustic energy quantity, referred to as the generalized acoustic energy density (GED), has been introduced.

Generalized acoustic energy density.

The properties of acoustic kinetic energy density and total energy density of sound fields in lightly damped enclosures have been explored thoroughly in the literature. Their increased spatial uniformity makes them more favorable measurement quantities for various applications than acoustic potential energy density (or squared pressure), which is most often used. In this paper, a generalized acoustic energy density (GED), will be introduced.

A hybrid modal analysis for enclosed sound fields.

A hybrid modal expansion that combines the free field Green's function and a modal expansion will be presented in this paper based on a review and an extension of the existing modal analysis theories for the sound field in enclosures. The enclosed sound field will be separated into the direct field and reverberant field, which have been treated together in the traditional modal analysis. Studies on a point source in rectangular enclosures show that the hybrid modal expansion converges notably faster than the traditional modal expansions, especially in the region near the source, and introduces much smaller errors with a limited number of modes.