HEARing CRC Supervisor: Jorg Buchholz and Jorge Meija

HEARing CRC Project: R2.2.1

Title:  Binaural Hearing Aid Signal Processing Methods in Complex Acoustic Environments.

Detail: The overall goal of this PhD project is to develop and evaluate new hearing aid signal processing strategies for improving speech understanding and/or listening effort in complex (particularly reverberant) environments. In order to conduct meaningful and repeatable laboratory tests, we will first develop and verify a Virtual Sound Environment loudspeaker system, based on the Ambisonics technique. This will include the simulation of Higher Order Ambisonic systems, their implementation and subjective/objective evaluation using the National Acoustic Laboratories 3D loudspeaker room, as well as the actual recording of real-life acoustic scenes, via spherical microphones. The recorded and subsequently faithfully reproduced scenes will help us test new hearing aid noise reduction and beamforming algorithms and characterize them based on their robustness in terms of reducing noise while preserving the crucial spatial cues.