An electronic windscreen for microphones

Abstract

Wind-noise pickup in microphones can be highly disturbing, especially for directional microphones that attain their directivity by using velocity or spatial derivatives of the acoustic pressure. Since small directional microphones are common in audio communications systems, the problem of wind noise is well known and the typical solution is to use a windscreen. Conventional windscreens that block the wind but do not significantly alter the sound field can be very effective, but need to be relatively large to attain a good reduction in wind-noise pick-up. Small directional microphone arrays are more commonly used in hearing aids since they have been clinically shown to improve hearing in noise for hearing-impaired users. Since hearing aids are required to be compact, an effective conventional windscreen is not practical. This talk describes a novel multi-microphone wind-noise reduction algorithm that we refer to as an ‘‘electronic windscreen.’’ This new algorithm and its variants have low computational cost and are therefore applicable to commercial digital hearing aids that use multi-microphone arrays to attain directionality.