Every person experiences sound differently and has their own individual listening preferences — which also depend on age and hearing ability. Therefore, factory settings for audio solutions cannot equally appeal to all listeners. The usual adjustment options also have limitations.
It is somewhat striking that audio playback personalization has not received more attention so far. The concepts have been around, but more advanced audio features allowing dynamic adjustments of audio playback to environmental conditions (e.g. driving noise) are typically applied in a generic, non-individualized way.
Dr. Jan Rennies-Hochmuth, Head of Personalized Hearing Systems, at the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology IDMT, and Professor for Hearing, Speech, and Neurotechnology at the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, Germany, has been working on the "YourSound" concept for a while now. In simple terms, YourSound is a virtual assistant that helps users determine sound preferences in just a few steps. Once set, those individual hearing preferences can be used to adjust the listening experience in any type of audio devices, infotainment systems, smartphones, or televisions - in a playful way and without knowledge of levels or frequencies.
While personalized fitting has been at the core of adjusting assistive hearing devices for many years, transferring the concepts from audiology to other, non-medical audio products is not straightforward. As Jan Rennies-Hochmuth knows well, one major challenge is to translate the perceptual demands of the user into technical parameters of the audio systems. Another challenge is that, in typical consumer audio products, introducing sound personalization is not about restoring audibility, but about matching individual audio preferences, which cannot be easily captured by standard audiological tests.
In this APDA webinar, the Fraunhofer IDMT specialist will discuss these challenges and the potential benefits of providing personalized sound playback in audio products. Topics will include different methods of non-medical self-fitting concepts to determine individualized sound playback parameters, usability aspects, applications in noise-dependent sound adjustments for automotive and consumer products, as well as recent evaluation data which suggests that individual sound profiles can be transferred between different audio devices.
About Fraunhofer IDMT
The Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology IDMT is one of 76 institutes and research facilities of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, a world-leading organization for application-oriented research. The institute's headquarters are located on the campus of the Technical University in Ilmenau, Thuringia, where researchers of internationally recognized expertise work in the fields of psychoacoustics and electroacoustics, audio technology, multimodal analysis of audio and video data, media forensics, and machine learning methods.
Under the claim "Where AI means Audio Intelligence," everything at the headquarters in Ilmenau revolves around the secure and efficient AI-based recognition and classification of audio and video data. Another focus is the development of customized solutions for the production and reproduction of authentic and spatial sound experiences for professional audio, entertainment, and automotive sectors. In addition, the institute is working on processes for the active improvement and targeted generation of sound fields, which can be used, for example, in the lightweight construction of vehicles to reduce unwanted noise.
At the Oldenburg Branch for Hearing, Speech, and Audio Technology HSA, located in Oldenburg, researchers are working to transpose scientific findings related to hearing perception and man-machine interaction into technological applications. The Institute's applied research focuses on the enhancement of sound quality and speech intelligibility, personalized audio reproduction, automatic speech recognition, and acoustic event detection based on artificial intelligence. More than 200 employees, doctoral candidates, students, and trainees from more than 18 nations currently work at the Ilmenau headquarters and the Oldenburg branch of the Institute for Hearing, Speech, and Audio Technology HSA.
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Sound Personalization in Audio Products
April 8, 9:00 a.m. Pacific: (12:00 p.m. Eastern)
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