Audio Space Research Articles

Electronic audio connection system and methods for providing same

The electronic audio connection system of the present invention provides an experience much like sharing a room with several involved parties, even though the parties are physically separated. Speech enhancement and speech emphasis processing functions ensure parties perceive the speech captured in the audio signals, typically the most important portion of the captured audio signals. To capture audio signals, each space is provided a plurality of microphones (112) arranged in that space so that the sum audio signal captured by the microphones enables the creation of a sharable audio space. Each separate physical space transmits (116) its captured audio signals to a central server (104) via a bi-directional data communications medium. The central server (104) processes the summed audio signals and in turn transmits playable audio signals to each separate physical space. Speakers (110) located in each separate physical space aurally transmit the playable audio signals. This creates an audio space shared by each of the active separate physical spaces.

WIRE 3 : Driving Around the Information Super-Highway

Interactive voice browsers offer an alternative paradigm that affords ubiquitous mobile access to the WWW using a wide range of consumer devices. This technology can facilitate a safe, “hands-free” browsing environment that is of importance both to car drivers and various mobile and technical professionals. This paper describes the challenges of architecting an interactive voice browser that combines digital audio with the features of a speech synthesizer to make structural elements of the document explicit to the listener. The aesthetics of the audio rendition can simultaneously help reduce the monotony factor and enhance comprehension. The evolution of the voice browser gave rise to a new conceptual model of the HTML document structure and its mapping to a 3D audio space. A number of novel features are discussed for improving both the user’s comprehension of the HTML document structure and their orientation within it. These factors, in turn, can improve the effectiveness of the browsing experience.

Data-Driven Modeling of Acoustical Instruments*

We present a framework for the analysis and synthesis of acoustical instruments based on data-driven probabilistic inference modeling. Audio time series and boundary conditions of a played instrument are recorded and the non-linear mapping from the control data into the audio space is inferred using the general inference framework of Cluster-Weighted Modeling. The resulting model is used for real-time synthesis of audio sequences from new input data.

Network Design for a Large Class of Teleconferencing Systems

This paper introduces a new class of network design problems implementing an integrated teleconferencing environment consisting of a video space showing images of the participants, an audio space providing their voices, and a graphics space providing reference and discussion material for the conference. These various spaces provide services of differing quality and type. The problem posed is to design topologically optimal networks that are least costly and that will have the flexibility to carry conferences of differing service quality and type. The actual networks studied in this paper consist of the design of a private network for a single conference among N identical, but arbitrarily located, sites. Network designs will be minimum link-cost or constrained minimum link-cost optimal, where the first is minimal over all possible network topologies and the second is constrained to consider only those topologies that have the minimum number of links. For terrestrial systems, one of the interesting results is that classical network topologies such as rings and minimum spanning trees are optimal for some conference types. However, no topology is optimal for all types, and some topologies use their capacity very poorly when used for a type for which they were not optimized. Unlike terrestrial networks, satellite networks may be easily configured to have all of their capacity available for all conference types.

Iso-Preference Method for Evaluating Speech Transmission Circuits

Subjective listening experiments have been conducted to establish a method for determining (1) contours of equal listener preference for a variety of speech transmission conditions in the audio space, and (2) a scale of magnitude of preference between contours based on preference difference thresholds in which the numbers are called TPU's (Transmission Preference Units). The scale is shown to satisfy the transitivity requirement even for widely different transmission conditions. Hence any two conditions with the same TPU number can be predicted to be equal in preference. The method involves only simple AB preference judgments for two brief samples of speech heard consecutively.