AES Section Meeting Reports

San Francisco - December 2, 2008

Meeting Topic: Voice Processor based on the Human Auditory Pathway

Moderator Name: Jim McTigue

Speaker Name: Lloyd Watts, Audience

Other business or activities at the meeting: Value of AES membership, upcoming meetings, and upcoming AES Conventions and Conferences

Meeting Location: Cogswell Polytechnical College, Sunnyvale, California, USA

Summary

Lloyd Watts discussed Audience's noise suppression technology based on the architecture and signal processing strategies of the human hearing system. By building detailed models of the key elements of the auditory pathway -- from the cochlea to the brain stem to the thalamus and cortex -- Audience was the first company to deliver a chip based on the science of Auditory Scene Analysis (ASA), which is the process in human hearing of characterization and grouping of the audio stream into its respective sources. Lloyd discussed and demonstrated the high-performance, robust noise suppression, and improved quality of communications that this technology can provide to mobile phone users in a wide variety of acoustic environments. Just as video processors emerged to support computationally intensive, real-time gaming, the Audience Voice Processor can provide real-time, robust, computationally -intensive pre- and post-processing of the audio signal path. This Voice Processor is a highly integrated and compact digital signal processor. Designed around a single, purpose-built DSP, the device delivers the power of the human hearing system in a highly optimized hardware and software solution. Its low power consumption and small package design are optimized for mobile phones and portable wireless peripherals. A lively question and answer session followed this meeting which was organized by committee member Jens-Peter Axelsson.

More About San Francisco Section