Face masks are important for public health, but they also make it harder to hear because they muffle high-frequency sound. We measured the acoustic effects of different types of face masks on speech and showed that well-placed microphones can help.
A team from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign developed a low-cost emergency ventilator for the COVID-19 pandemic. Our team adapted audio signal processing algorithms to create a simple, low-complexity alarm system for the ventilator.
Most spatial sound enhancement algorithms focus on source separation, but we can also remix sounds, changing their relative levels while preserving their spatial cues. Remixing systems are easier to build and suffer less from distortion.
Beamforming relies on precise distances between microphones. In a deformable array, the microphones can move relative to each other, which can dramatically impact performance. We can use statistical modeling to compensate for this uncertainty.
What if you had a headset that would let you listen through microphones in the ears of someone else in the room, so that you can hear what they hear? Better yet, what if your headset was connected to the ears of everyone else in the room?
Our new massive distributed microphone array dataset, recorded in a real room with 160 microphones and 10 speakers, is available with an open license from the Illinois Databank.
We collected a first-of-its-kind dataset of wearable microphone impulse responses at 160 locations around the body and on different wearable accessories.
