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

I just made (most of) my research papers open access

From wikimedia commons

Having ranted a few years ago about the issues around open access to academic research outputs, and the lack of it, I’ve spent quite a bit of time chasing up recent developments in publishing guidelines. As a direct result of research funding organisations insisting on open access to publications that they have funded the situation has improved considerably.

In many cases either authors can publish pre-print versions of their work on institutional repositories like Salford’s one here, in others author’s can self-archive on personal websites only. Unfortunately this sometimes specifically excludes any site that utilises metadata to enable searching of archived material. So you can publish (or at least self-archive) the publication on any site that does not allow it to be searched for amongst other publications. At least this means that I can point researchers who email me for papers at a link which is progress. There is a great guide to what is available here on the SHERPA site.

Anyway, having researched the various policies around publishers that I have submitted work to I have created an archive on a personal web site as permitted and most of these papers are available for free download.

Here it is.

There are still

‘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