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Facebook smart glasses and audio

Facebook's future plans for AR smartglasses are still in the works, but one part of the equation that could soon see the light of day is smart audio. Spatial audio and augmented audio reality are two arenas in which Facebook is actively interested, and the company's newest Facebook Reality Labs research update details how the company plans to make devices that can tune out the real world and make virtual objects sound like they're right next to you, even if they're not really there.

CNET

Travel tech accessories

The gadgets you pack can make or break a big trip—so if something is going to take up precious space in your carry-on, you need to be sure it's not going to fail on you. We put a number of travel tech accessories, from portable LTE hotspots to gadgets that'll keep you from losing your Airbnb's keys, to the test and came up with this list of the gear that'll make your life easier, no matter where your travels might take you.

Conde Nast Traveler

The list includes a tiny white noise machine, the Marpac Go

 

 

Sonic Travel Wonders

In a world dominated by spectacle, what are the auditory equivalents of the Eiffel Tower, Stonehenge, or the Grand Canyon? If your ears chose your next holiday destination, where would they go? National Geo Traveler lists 15 places to visit for extraordinary sounds.

 

Includes “The Great Stalacpipe Organ,” the largest musical instrument in the world, built into Virginia’s Luray Caverns.

 

 

Now these are excellent listeners

Harman develops premium audio systems for 25 automakers under nine brand names. To ensure each sounds both excellent and brand-unique, the company has trained 100 expert listeners in five countries. Each must pass a hearing test and demonstrate an ability to identify variations in seven bands of audio (such as on an equalizer). That's spectral analysis. Spatial performance is a system's ability to place each instrument or vocal input on a soundstage. Dynamics is about clarity at varying volume levels. Integrity has to do with buzzing, squeaks, and rattles in the system installation. Experts assess these four attributes as they listen to seven audio tracks per car on 200 cars per year, comparing each against 400 reference cars.

Motor Trend

The Sound of Silence

Noise is at once basic and devilishly complex. By definition, noise is simply unwanted sound. But to the community of experts who attempt to measure it, control it, and hunt it down in the products we use every day, noise can be a problem that requires extraordinary engineering diligence, sophisticated instruments, and, occasionally, a bit of imagination.

John Galeotafiore, the engineer who oversees Consumer Reports’ testing of outdoor power equipment, has spent a considerable amount of time rigging up sound meters in interesting ways to simulate the position of the human ear. “We clip a microphone to a baseball cap when we’re testing lawn mowers,” he says. “That’s important because it captures what the consumer will experience in their own backyard.”

Consumer Reports

 

The New York Times adds how music has progressively become "louder"

"In the predigital era, compression required a mastering engineer whose job is to create the physical master for the manufacturing process, to employ restraint and finesse. With digital audio, a few mouse clicks can compress the dynamic range with brute force. The result is music that sounds more aurally aggressive — like the television commercial.

During the 1990s, as digital technology infiltrated the recording process, some mastering engineers wielded compression like a cudgel, competing to produce the loudest recordings. This recording industry “loudness war” was driven by linked aesthetic and economic imperatives. A louder record grabs your attention — and will often be perceived, at least at first, to have better sound quality than a less compressed album — and musicians didn’t want their product to sound weak by comparison. Maximum loudness, it was thought, was a prerequisite for commercial success."

Machines and voice learning

(intelligent Voice)’s CEO Nigel Cannings says the breakthrough came when he decided to see what would happen if he pointed a machine-learning system at the waveform of the voice data – its pattern of spikes and troughs – rather than the audio recording directly. It worked brilliantly.

Training his system on this visual representation let him harness powerful existing techniques designed for image classification. “I built this dialect classification system based on pictures of the human voice,” he says.

New Scientist

 

Here earbuds

In design, they’re simple. They’re very traditional earbuds, with a small circular bulb that holds a few microphones and a processor. All the processing of sound is done individually on each bud, and they can be calibrated to each user's individual separate ears. Their software leverages tried-and-true acoustic techniques for noise cancellation and effects, but also machine learning algorithms able to adapt to your surroundings.

The app associated with the Here buds has three tabs: a volume knob, which is the master switch for the volume of your world; an equalizer, coupled with effects like echo and reverberation; and a tab split into Tune In and Tune Out, which are pre-made filters meant to either enhance the soundscape or cut it out tailored to certain situations.

Popular Science

 

Voices for those unable to speak

For people rendered unable to speak by cerebral palsy, stroke, or traumatic brain injury, VocaliD’s software creates custom speech patterns that sound like the original person’s voice.

After recording whatever sounds a person can produce, VocaliD’s software sifts through its database of 15,000 volunteers’ voice samples for the closest match, based on factors like age and accent. The software blends the subject’s sample with the surrogate voice’s thousands of prerecorded sentences to turn typed text into speech.

BusinessWeek

 

Can you hear me now?

To supplement his old-school hearing aid, he favors a $350 iPhone-linked earpiece made by Sound World Solutions, a hearing-hardware maker in Park Ridge, Ill., for whom he’s begun to consult. With the Sound World device on, he can amplify phone calls and streaming music as well as his surroundings. A third, $500 earpiece was custom-made by Ultimate Ears in Irvine, Calif., to help him detect a wider range of musical tones while composing. For restaurants and theaters, he has a $45 directional microphone that pairs with a $5 app to isolate desired voices. And for especially cacophonous places, he has spare $700 microphones, made by Etymotic Research in Elk Grove Village, Ill., that he can strap to companions.

Bloomberg

Dolby Theatre gets a tech upgrade

When viewers tune into the Academy Awards Sunday, they can be forgiven for thinking the swelling music is coming from an orchestra hidden somewhere inside the 3,400-seat Dolby Theatre. The truth is a little less glamorous - they are a mile away, playing live at Capitol Records.

The sound is then piped through fiber optic cables back to the theater - in only 2.7 milliseconds.

"We just keep trying to get that latency down as close to zero, so that performers can hear exactly what the orchestra's doing and the orchestra can respond,"

CBS News

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