Turn the music down! Repurposing assistive listening broadcast systems to remove nuisance sounds

Abstract

Many public venues, such as theaters and houses of worship, use assistive listening systems that broadcast a copy of the sound being played over a public address system to the listening devices of patrons with hearing loss. While these wireless systems are generally intended to amplify sound for listening device users, they can also be used to cancel nuisance sounds, such as loud background music that makes conversation difficult. In this work, we demonstrate a binaural listening device that uses an assistive listening system transmitter and receiver to attenuate music played through loudspeakers while preserving speech sounds from nearby talkers. A set of adaptive filters tracks the acoustic transfer functions from the loudspeakers to the earpiece microphones, predicts the music signal received by each earpiece, and subtracts that predicted signal from the mixture signal of the corresponding earpiece. The binaural adaptive system tracks changes in the unwanted music signal as the user moves while preserving the acoustic and spatial cues of the desired speech sounds. [Work supported by the Intelligence Community Postdoctoral Research Fellowship Program, National Science Foundation, and Discovery Partners Institute.]