A new study has concluded that musical training gives listeners better frequency selection abilities, particularly at higher frequencies. The study titled ‘Psychophysical auditory filter estimates reveal sharper cochlear tuning in musicians’ (J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 136, EL33 (2014);) suggested that “Increased cochlear tuning (i.e., auditory filter resolution) in musicians would help explain their enhanced pitch
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Our Brains Have Built-In Noise Reduction
Working with ferrets – whose auditory system is a lot like ours – a team of researchers at the University of Maryland have shown how a form of noise reduction happens in the brain. Speech and other dynamic signals get boosted while noise gets dampened, leading to better clarity for relevant signals.
Continue reading »Extracting Audio From a Mix by Singing It – Source Separation via Input Matching
Paris Smaragdis is an assistant professor at the University of Illinois who specializes in research that involves machine listening. This includes source localization (where the sound is coming from), sound recognition (such as a traffic accident at an intersection) and source separation (taking individual voices or instruments out of a mix). Source separation is a
Continue reading »Graphene Earphones
In March of this year, researchers at the University of California Berkeley published a paper demonstrating the use of graphene to build a set of Electrostatic loudspeakers which would be good for use as in-ear headphones. They compared the performance to a set of (cheap) sennheiser earbuds and found reasonable comparable performance. The key benefits
Continue reading »FFFT?
Last week I posted on twitter about an upcoming paper to be presented at SODA (Symposium on Discrete Algorithms). The new algorithm for the calculation of the Nearly Optimal Sparse Fourier Transform (Abstract). This new algorithm for certain specialized cases of the Discrete Fourier Transform, which allows processing of digital signals to create JPEG images,
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