Immersive multitalker remote microphone system

Abstract

Hearing aids and other listening devices perform poorly in noisy, reverberant environments with many overlapping sound sources. Remote microphones, which are worn by a talker and transmit low-noise, low-reverberation speech directly to a hearing device, can improve intelligibility even in adverse environments. However, most commercial remote microphone accessories can only be used with one talker at a time and remove the interaural cues that listeners use to localize sound sources. Using the Tympan open-source hardware platform, we demonstrate a multitalker remote microphone system that preserves interaural cues and room acoustic effects. A pair of wireless microphones transmits sound from two talkers to the Tympan system. A set of real-time adaptive filters running on the embedded processor match the magnitude and phase of the remote microphone signals to the sound received by the earpiece microphones. The earpiece output has the signal-to-noise ratio of the remote microphones but the spatial cues of the on-ear microphones. Because the remote microphones provide low-noise reference signals, the system can track motion in real time and does not need to perform explicit source localization or separation.