Archive for the ‘Research’ Category
May 4, 2017

For a long time now Ofcom and broadcasters have received complaints that speech on TV can be difficult, or impossible, to understand. The problem is of course much worse for viewers who with even quite mild hearing loss. Reasons are varied and well described in a recent Conversation article from one of our researchers, Lauren Ward. Causes include unfamiliar accents, unclear speaking from actors, excessive background sound effects or music and even occasionally badly recorded location audio.
Recent highly publicised complaints about Poldark, Happy Valley and SS-GB, and earlier, Jamaica Inn and Wonders of the Universe have generated something of a media storm over the issue which shows no sign of abating and was debated recently in the House of Lords.
At the Acoustics Research Centre at
University of Salford we’ve been working on solutions to these problems for a long time, currently a lot of research is looking at how new object-based audio formats can solve some of these problems and make TV sound more accessible. Object-based audio has the potential to allow individual personalisation of TV sound based the viewer’s preferences or needs. Our most recent work, carried out using the DTS MDA object-based audio format can be found in the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society article here. It is freely available as an open access publication – please feel free to read and comment. You can find more details of our accessible audio work on our blog here.

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Posted in broadcast, Research, University of Salford | Tagged accessible audio, tv sound | Leave a Comment »
September 23, 2015
IBC 2015 Demonstration of Object Based Clean Audio
The problems of hearing impaired people watching TV have been well documented of late. Loud music, background noise and other factors can ruin the enjoyment of TV for many people with hearing loss – around 10 million people in the UK according to Action on Hearing Loss.
In previous research funded by the ITC and Ofcom I looked at solutions that took advantage of the (then) recent introduction of 5.1 surround sound broadcast. Some of this ended up in broadcast standards and is being used by broadcasters. Now emerging new audio standards are opening the door to improving TV sound much more for hearing impaired people, and also for many others.
I’ve written about some of this work before, a recent blog post described our journal article in the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society where my colleague Rob Oldfield and I picked up where my PhD left off and looked at how we could improve TV sound for hearing impaired people by using features of emerging object-based audio formats. In object-based audio all component parts of a sound scene are broadcast separate and are combined at the set top box based on metadata contained in the broadcast transmission. This means that speech, and other elements important to understanding narrative, can be treated differently compared to background sound (such as music, noise etc).
I’ve just returned from IBC in Amsterdam where we’ve been demonstrating some University of Salford research outputs on object-based clean audio with DTS, a key player in object-based audio developments.

IBC 2015: The largest global electronic media and entertainment show in Amsterdam last week.
Object-based Clean Audio at IBC 2015
Last week we spent a week showing the results of our recent collaboration with DTS – presenting personalised TV audio and Read the rest of this entry ?
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Posted in Research, technology, University of Salford | Tagged broadcast, clean audio, dts, DTS:X, hearing impaired, MDA, Multi Dimensional Audio, tv sound | Leave a Comment »
February 4, 2014

Well I finally did it. PhD viva is now over. Passed. Subject to some minor corrections I’m a doctor!
After a lot of years of work, and three years of interruption in the middle to work on our MediaCityUK campus development, I finally submitted my thesis on ‘Improving Television Sound for People with Hearing Impairments’ just before Christmas and defended it successfully in a viva last Wednesday. Hence the lack of posts here, if I was going to write it had to be proper work! It’s more than a nice feeling, very very good indeed. Definitely a relief. I’ve spent all weekend celebrating and enjoying the congratulations and good wishes of family, friends and colleagues.
To cap the weekend off a parcel arrived in the post today from Wiley. Complementary copies of Media Production, Delivery and Interaction for Platform Independent Systems: Format-Agnostic Media, the book I co-edited and co-authored with colleagues on the FascinatE project last year. Ha! 2014 is shaping up very nicely.
So what comes next? I’m fortunate enough to Read the rest of this entry ?
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Posted in Research, technology, University of Salford | Tagged fascinate, PhD | Leave a Comment »
June 1, 2013

This week has seen the final demonstration of research developed over three and a half years of the FascinatE EU FP7 research project. The project has developed a complete end-to-end future broadcast system which combines ultra high definition panoramic video, 3D ambisonic and object based audio, new methods for delivery of interactive AV content and new interfaces and methods to interact with the AV media at the user end. It’s been my pleasure to lead University of Salford’s part of the project and this week, to host the final demonstration of the project.
We hosted the final demonstration event at our MediaCityUK building – it’s one of the few places that could actually support what we were trying to do, the infrastructure of the building was actually designed for this kind of thing but we pushed it pretty hard this week. FascinatE partners worked through Read the rest of this entry ?
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Posted in MediaCityUK, Research, Salford Quays, technology, University of Salford | Tagged audio, bbc, broadcast, fascinate, interactive, mediacityuk, research | 2 Comments »
January 30, 2013

Dolby’s screening room in Soho Square, London
Last week I had an opportunity to visit Dolby Labs new London home in Soho Square, the trip was mainly to visit one of our students from one of our audio engineering programmes at Salford University who is on placement there for 12 months. The screening room here is impressive in itself – a small cinema with near-perfect acoustics and a 4K projector, pretty much an ideal listening environment and as part of the visit I got to experience Dolby’s Atmos demos. I’ve been looking forward to this for quite a while…
Atmos is an exciting prospect for many of us involved in audio research as it is the first commercial object based audio system that has potential to go mainstream. Read the rest of this entry ?
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Posted in Research, technology, Uncategorized | Tagged Dolby, Dolby Atmos, surround sound | 7 Comments »
December 28, 2012
Just read @melissaterras great article here on her experiences using social media to promote her research papers.

Unsurprisingly the papers she blogged about and tweeted were downloaded more, the only surprise was how much more. I am curious how much of this is because they were available for free download rather than being behind a paywall though. Would similar results have happened had she linked to the usual “you do not subscribe to this journal” message?
It’s another insight into academic publishing which doesn’t make pretty reading for publishing academics.
The paywall adopted by the vast majority of academic journals might as well be designed to prevent people accessing knowledge. But this access problem has no impact on publisher profits. Academics have to publish in these journals because of national research assessment exercises, institutions have to pay for access so that academics can cite the articles in the papers they submit, often to the same journals. Sound like a scam? Feels like it too. Read the rest of this entry ?
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Posted in Research, Social Media | 1 Comment »
October 11, 2011

Foyer of University of Salford at MediaCityUK (pic by Heloukee)
I’ve been here 4 weeks now but we’re on week 2 for our students. Before we opened around 1600 students attended inductions for our building from courses covering areas such as TV, radio, journalism, media, audio, video, animation and multimedia. I’ve had a great week or so seeing the rooms I’ve spent the last three and a half years helping plan full of activity. There’s still snagging going on of course – it’s a new build and we lost a little testing time before opening but both staff and students are on a learning curve here so something of a shared adventure taking place.
Most of the facilities are up and running; TV and radio studios are full with Read the rest of this entry ?
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Posted in MediaCityUK, Research, Salford Quays, Social Media, technology, University of Salford | 3 Comments »