This post accompanies our presentation “Immersive multitalker remote microphone system” at the 181st Acoustical Society of America Meeting in Seattle.
In our previous post, which accompanied a paper at WASPAA 2021, we proposed an improved wireless microphone system for hearing aids and other listening devices. Unlike conventional remote microphones, the proposed system works with multiple talkers at once, and it uses earpiece microphones to preserve the spatial cues that humans use to localize and separate sound. In that paper, we successfully demonstrated the adaptive filtering system in an offline laboratory experiment.
To see if it would work in a real-time, real-world listening system, we participated in an Acoustical Society of America hackathon using the open-source Tympan platform. The Tympan is an Arduino-based hearing aid development kit. It comes with high-quality audio hardware, a built-in rechargeable battery, a user-friendly Android app, a memory card for recording, and a comprehensive modular software library. Using the Tympan, we were able to quickly demonstrate our adaptive binaural filtering system in real hardware.
The Tympan processor connects to a stereo wireless microphone system and binaural earbuds.