IBC 2015: TV Sound for Hearing Impaired People

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

Clean Audio for TV broadcast: An Object-Based Approach for Hearing-Impaired Viewers

Update: I just uploaded a new journal article published last month in the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society. Happily the University of Salford paid for it to be open access as part of their open access strategy so it’s freely available for anyone to download.

The paper (right) is a follow up to my PhD research, which was all about looking at methods to improve TV sound for people with hearing impairments by enabling what is usually known as ‘clean audio’ – helping hearing impaired people to hear speech more clearly than is often the case.

The early part of the PhD was funded by the ITC and then Ofcom, later parts were carried out as part of the EU funded FascinatE project which I’ve written about on this blog before. The FascinatE project utilised what is known as object-based audio to implement interactive 3D (with height) spatial audio which would vary depending on the user-defined visual scene. The FascinatE viewer could have free navigation of the visual scene and point their ‘camera’ to whatever part of the video panorama was of interest to them. The audio ‘objects’ rotated and/or moved to match the chosen view.

In the more recent clean audio work above

‘The future of television?’ FascinatE: The Final Demonstration

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

Live football broadcast – OB at Eastlands

After a chance meeting at BVE recently I was invited by Ian Rosam to join Sky’s outside broadcast audio crew to see how they cover live football so found myself at Manchester City vs Blackburn at Eastlands on Saturday afternoon. Really useful visit from a couple of angles for me: one is for the Fascinate Project, the other is my current teaching in digital control in audio. Also always good to develop links with the industry we are sending our graduates out into.

The FascinatE project I’ve talked about once or twice before – we’re developing an end to end ‘future broadcast’ system for live events and as part of this we covered a Premier League game with 180 degree hi resolution video and 3D sound at Stamford Bridge thanks to the good people at Chelsea Football Club and friends at SISLive, the outside broadcaster. Saturday was a bonus as Sky have slightly different methods and equipment compared to SIS and it was another opportunity to get first hand knowledge of how live sports broadcast is done. Also

BVE2012 Looking good, who’s going? Time to register…

One seminar for me to catch is “Sound of the Games”, Dennis Baxter, Sound Designer for 2012 London Olympics. Interesting if you caught him on radio 4, The Sound Of Sport you’ll know what I mean. Also Immersive audio systems explored – Sound for 3D with Pieter Schillbeeckx, Soundfield and a friend and neighbour of mine at MediaCityUK, Chris Pike from BBC R & D.

http://www.bvexpo.com/

#12hrfashion: Salford & Melbourne Online Fashion Collaboration

Logo from the Salford & RMIT Fashion Facebook page

As I type this around 60 students at University of Salford and about the same number at RMIT in Melbourne, Australia are coming to the end of a 12 hour fashion design-and-make collaboration and putting the finishing touches to their garments. The collaboration came out of discussion at Salford’s Media, Digital Technology & the Creative Economy  Steering Group and was the brainchild of Bashir Aswat (Fashion, Art & Design School) and Marianne Patera (Computing, Science & Engineering) who drove the whole project from the start.

The fashion groups in Salford and Melbourne both sent sealed bags of materials to each other in advance of

Bashir at #12hrfashion

the event, students at the receiving end had no idea what they were being sent ahead of the start of the 12 hour marathon. All student groups were linked to matching groups at the other side of the world by social networks and mobile devices. Twitter, Facebook, Skype, Bambuser, Ustream have all been used so that students could communicate right through the process. At each end a big screen displayed a live video overview of activity at the other side of the world.

I was there for the first couple of hours at Salford and have been following online since then – the event has been amazing! The buzz in the room as preparations were made for the 9pm start was really infectious, excited students and staff distributing mystery parcels sent from Melbourne – many with friendly messages on from their counterparts in Australia.

@samrecordsmusic is carrying out an MSc project on user generated content and motivation, he’s covering this as a case study and was helping out with some of the tech on the night.

I was

Well connected coffee?

Sandpit for ideas:

The Egg: Cafe/Foyer at University of Salford, MediaCityUK

The foyer of our building at MediaCityUK is big. It’s double height and has a cafe which will serve hot drinks, tea, coffee (gotta be GOOD coffee, I’m fussy), paninis, sandwiches etc.

The floor is tiled and if you look under a tile it has 4o Gb/s bandwidth connectivity to a bunch of media servers and to the rest of the building. Oh and big bandwidth out to anywhere else if you want.

Photosynth on wordpress.com

Oh. It seems that embedding photosynth doesn’t work on wordpress.com.

That’s a pity as it means I’m going to have to pay for a server in order to experiment with photosynth. Nothing for free right? Grrrrr!

Here’s the deal…

I want to try to “broadcast” an event using only mobile devices to see how far User Generated Content (UGC) can work to cover live events using current ubiquitous technology, the stuff you have in your pocket now. It’s come out of a number of components falling into place in my head on Wednesday (don’t you love serendipity?).